Apple and IBM Announce Partnership To Bring iOS + Cloud Services To Enterprises 126
jmcbain writes: According to an article on Recode, Apple and IBM have announced a major partnership to bring mobile services to enterprise customers. "The deal calls for IBM and Apple to develop more than 100 industry-specific applications that will run on the iPhone and iPad. Apple will add a new class of service to its AppleCare program and support aimed at enterprise customers. IBM will also begin to sell iPhones and iPads to its corporate customers and will devote more than 100,000 people, including consultants and software developers, to the effort. Enterprise applications will in many cases run on IBM's cloud infrastructure or on private clouds that it has built for its customers. Data for those applications will co-exist with personal data like photos and personal email that will run on Apple's iCloud and other cloud services."
Notes (Score:1)
Notes
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Aargh!... Please just let it die...
The end is nigh (Score:2, Informative)
Sounds like the effing apocalypse to me.
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Who would do this? Why would you run any part of your business on a machine rooted by a probable competitor?
Re: The end is nigh (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple certainly isn't running their own cloud servers. They've done everything to get rid of that. IBM is an OK partner... If IBM is interested this week.
If IBM is willing to convert their "Big Iron" platform front ends to Apple's mobile devices we got something really useful that steps on nobody's toes in either company. It's really just a matter of skipping the crappy web interfaces and building out IBM supported ones in native hardware language on both sides.
Personally, IBM is a short sighted, sucky partner. My company "bet the business" on their support offerings, and I've got my career on the IBM i platform... IBM just plain sucks now compared to ten years ago, it's a gutted shell. But they can "sort of roll out" some really cool stuff. IBM just doesn't stick around to make it shine like they used to.
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I was on the receiving end of one of IBM's first acquisitions into the "cloud" space back around '09 when they realized, "hey, there is this thing called the cloud and we need in on it!" I have no issue with that if you are a Novartis or a BofA in that the primary business lies in other areas, but here is/was a technology company that espoused to be a master of all things technology and consulting and selling these services to others.
Case in point, the best attempts internally, and only at a company like I
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Try watching where your iOS devices connect to when you send an iMessage. Or use Photostream.
Re: The end is nigh (Score:1)
Is there an app for that ?
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Wireshark... unfortunately, no iOS port yet.
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You need an app for that?
Hell hath frozen over. (Score:1)
Who woulda thunk it. THe PC Junior meets the Apple ][
Enterprises (Score:2)
Has StarFleet confirmed this?
(and the US Navy retired CVAN 65)
Microsoft and OS/2 . . . ? (Score:2)
That didn't work out too well.
Hmmm . . . but then again . . . didn't Apple and IBM try to collaborate on something called Taligent and Kaleida . . . ?
Well, those two never managed to see the light of day. I believe Taligent is often used as an example of a "Death March" project. It ran for over seven years, but at any point in time during the project, it was only planned as a two year project.
OS/2 worked out well for Microsoft ... (Score:2)
Microsoft and OS/2. That didn't work out too well.
It worked out great for Microsoft. Microsoft NT began life as OS/2 NT, the portable cross-platform version of OS/2. As IBM and Microsoft went their separate ways OS/2 NT was renamed Windows NT.
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Great?
It's turned in to Windows 8.1
How is that great?
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I bet you were a cute baby, too. 20 years later...
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A bit more than 20 years.
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Not quite. MS started NT when Cutler came on board but kept working on OS/2 separately and didn't have any plans to support it long term at that point. He started NT from scratch with his own small group that looked down on those that were working on OS/2.
NT was originally a next generation OS/2 not a next generation Windows. IBM and Microsoft worked together on 16-bit OS/2 1.x. They decided to work separately in parallel on the 32-bit x86 specific OS/2 2.x (IBM) and on the cross platform portable OS/2 3.x, aka NT OS/2 (Microsoft). NT OS/2 was eventually rebranded as Windows NT. NT was a re-write, but it started as a re-write for OS/2.
PowerPC worked out for Apple ... (Score:2)
Hmmm . . . but then again . . . didn't Apple and IBM try to collaborate on something called Taligent and Kaleida . . . ?
Apple, IBM and Motorola partnered for the PowerPC CPU. It worked out. PowerPC ultimately lost to Intel but that wasn't so much a PowerPC failure as it was that Intel worked friggin miracles with the x86 architecture. No one ever imagined they could get x86 to the performance levels that they did. I suppose technically they did not. Intel actually went to RISC but its hidden in the core of the CPU and only the legacy x86 api is exposed. x86 instructions are translated to risc core micro operations and these
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Intel actually went to RISC but its hidden in the core of the CPU and only the legacy x86 api is exposed. x86 instructions are translated to risc core micro operations and these microps are what actually executes.
Intel have been using microcode since the P5 in 1993.
Apple's first use of PowerPC was in 1994
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Re:PowerPC worked out for Apple ... (Score:4, Informative)
Intel actually went to RISC but its hidden in the core of the CPU and only the legacy x86 api is exposed. x86 instructions are translated to risc core micro operations and these microps are what actually executes.
Intel have been using microcode since the P5 in 1993. Apple's first use of PowerPC was in 1994
Apple, IBM and Motorola began working together on the PowerPC in 1991 when PC's were using the 486.
The RISC core and micro ops that I referred to were introduced in the Pentium Pro (P6) in 1995, not the Pentium (P5).
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I suspect you're confusing micro-ops with microcode.
Current architectures (not all, but not just Intel) decompose the user-visible instruction set into a stream of micro-ops, (more primitive instructions) and send that stream to a dispatch unit. The dispatch unit resolves dependency issues and as requirements are met, sends the micro-ops to one of a series of execution units. As micro-ops complete, their results are sent to the retirement unit. Note that between dispatch and retirement, the architectural
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You've just said the same thing twice.
First, you said the instruction decoder turns an instruction into a series of micro-ops.
Second, you said they're translated into code entry point, that points to a series of what are effectively micro-ops.
Microcode is the definition of the set of micro-ops.
Perhaps you're thinking of the code-morphing technology Transmeta used in their Crusoe CPU? That was a separate internal CPU with runtime translation of x86 code into the native code of the internal CPU.
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I'm thinking of the code-morphing, similar to Transmeta. From where I learned about it, the runtime translation target was called micro-ops. We have different definitions. Someone I once knew referred to micro-ops (my definition) as "caveman primitives."
Still, it's an internal CISC->RISC translation, and the retirement unit hides that when it's all done.
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Apple, IBM and Motorola partnered for the PowerPC CPU. It worked out.
Oh so really true, and that is why consumers are inundated with power PC chips today... Hmm, err, Apple was really loyal to IBM, yes they were. Yes yes! One for all and all for one. Just saving up that loyalty for later. Sure, that's it.
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Are we counting Xbox 360s and Playstations?
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Funny, I could swear that both Sony and Microsoft punted powerPC for AMD silicon.
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Oh so really true, and that is why consumers are inundated with power PC chips today...
Are we counting Xbox 360s and Playstations?
Funny, I could swear that both Sony and Microsoft punted powerPC for AMD silicon.
That doesn't change the fact that there are in fact 83 million Xbox 360s and 80 million Playstation 3s in the hands of consumers.
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Millions of aging buggy whips do not have a great deal of importance to the modern auto market.
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Millions of aging buggy whips do not have a great deal of importance to the modern auto market.
Those shiny new autos are also full of PowerPC chips. :-)
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Or Wii's for that matter? A lotta STBs and consoles run PowerPC.
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Obsolete consoles running powerPCs, a fine straw to grasp at.
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Apple, IBM and Motorola partnered for the PowerPC CPU. It worked out. PowerPC ultimately lost to Intel but that wasn't so much a PowerPC failure as it was that Intel worked friggin miracles with the x86 architecture. No one ever imagined they could get x86 to the performance levels that they did.
Oh so really true, and that is why consumers are inundated with power PC chips today...
Didn't you read the next line that I wrote? I inserted it above for reference.
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Apple was loyal to IBM. It was IBM that didn't give a crap about making low power designs, which is why we never saw a PowerBook G5. IBM forced Apple to move to Intel, or to stop selling laptops.
And PowerPC has seen it's fair share of design wins, including use in a lot of networking gear; to say nothing of IBM's successful P-series of UNIX servers.
You're forgetting... (Score:1)
They also collaborated, along with Motorola, on the PowerPC. Admittedly, that's a dubious thing to note.
Sweet (Score:2)
The i* device revolution has been extremely annoying for enterprise IT since Apple has had almost zero understanding or interest in supporting us. Things like requiring plugging in an iphone to a PC to turn off the find my iphone feature with iOS 7 as an example (No I can't contact all 300 field users and ask them to mail me their iphone for a few days).
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OR having the same log in on their work device as their home device.
Did you know just having several iPads can use up all your 'shared' slots?
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The i* device revolution has been extremely annoying for enterprise IT since Apple has had almost zero understanding or interest in supporting us. Things like requiring plugging in an iphone to a PC to turn off the find my iphone feature with iOS 7 as an example (No I can't contact all 300 field users and ask them to mail me their iphone for a few days).
This was fixed a year or so ago with iOS 7, maybe earlier? iOS devices can be remotely configured and updated. Coincidentally I just watched a WWDC video that mentioned this, I'm pretty sure it was from last year's WWDC not the recent one.
Re:Sweet (Score:4, Interesting)
No it wasn't, as soon as you install iOS 7 and enable find my iphone the device is locked to that users icloud account, there's a way to disable it but it requires attaching the phone to a physical machine. You can disable the feature through MDM now, but it has zero effect if the user has already set it up (horse meet barn door). We've lost a half dozen devices due to folks being let go and refusing to unlock our property, Apple's gotten better about unlocking the devices in the last couple months, but if they're not on our main account so we can easily show proof of ownership we're SOL.
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In any case, you just keep a share of the last salary until they return all your property. Problem solved (unless you pay them peanuts and the iDevice is worth more than a month's salary).
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Withhold last paychecks isn't legal in the majority of states.
As to the "incomplete" setup, prior to iOS 7 it was a feature that the users could use to find a misplaced device, then suddenly through an OTA update it became a way to brick a phone.
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Your talking about people that were let go? Why on earth do you care if they have to be mailed in if no one is using them (at least for a time)? I agree the management tool should be able to do it, but you made it sound like you had some reason for active users to be sending in their devices. You clearly do not.
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Because by the time they're terminated you CAN'T unlock the device without their icloud account name and password, sending in their devices is to apply the code that blocks the feature and thus stop the phone from being bricked without an icloud password. You can now do that through an MDM client, but only if the feature is not yet enabled, if it is you have to have to have the user disable it and then hook it to the PC.
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Why do some companies spend so much time worrying about phones. People have all sorts of devices from the company that can't be locked out if people just use the device "out of the box". Laptop, desktop, USB stick, hard drive, tablet, car, etc. Companies get people to return company property when they leave the company, with all sorts of traditional mechanisms. Salespeople have company cars fairly often, and companies don't have a remote lock on the car to make sure that they get it back. Why get worked up
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Wait, you completely misunderstand, the USER can lock the device using the find my iphone feature, when they return the property it cannot be reused until they enter their icloud account password after a device reset. This isn't about IT's ability to lock the device, that exists for any Activesync device, this is about a piece of company property being tied to a users icloud account at the hardware level.
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You can configure some things this way, but not others.
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Not so.
Settings > Privacy > Location Services > Find My iPhone
Only the Apple account password is needed, not a computer.
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It isn't just Apple. Many Android and Windows tablets have smiliar issues.
Things like requiring plugging in an iphone to a PC to turn off the find my iphone feature with iOS 7 as an example (No I can't contact all 300 field users and ask them to mail me their iphone for a few days).
This featrue has at least some possible use in the enterprise. The whole "app
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You can redirect services to your own servers, that's part of the enterprise SDK. Most people access that functionality through their MDM/EMM.
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That is likely because Apple addressed it more than 5 years ago. The enterprise App store does precisely that and you have been able to restrict Apple App store installation for about the same amount of time....
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Since when do you have to plug your iphone in to turn off find my iphone? Not in iOS 6, 7 or 8.
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What are you talking about? That is not a requirement of iOS7 or any other version. You can now and always have been able to turn of find my iPhone from the device. Apple has some problems for enterprise support, but yours is not one of them...
This has got to worry Microsoft (Score:1)
Ok, this hits way too close to home. I suspect Satya is up in his ivory tower right now, curled up in a ball and sobbing like a little girl. And I feel for him; it's going to be a gargantuan task to fend off Apple from taking chunks of Microsoft's red meat.
Apple has lost their innovators (Score:1)
and the ability to bring good ideas to market, so not they just partner and buy things.
Only on Slashdot... (Score:2)
Only on Slashdot would someone say that IBM wanting to get into the mobile game without starting from scratch = Apple not innovating.
Somebody needs to make a new 1984 commercial.. (Score:4, Insightful)
30 years after the original 1984 commercial the rebels have been co-opted and are now partnering with big brother. That would make a great commercial: "2014". You could have the olympian women up on the screen and everything's colorful and everyone has prettier outfits but they're all still obedient slaves.
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um power pc?
"PowerPC (an acronym for Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a RISC instruction set architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM."
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I'm not totally sure about your analogy. Maybe Aliens is more like it? You know, the part where the alien gets its egg inside and bursts out of his chest.
Omigod get it off my face, wait, where did it go?
You mean Little Brother? (Score:3)
30 years after the original 1984 commercial the rebels have been co-opted and are now partnering with big brother.
In what way is IBM Big Brother any more? They have not been for a decade or more... if anything they are the Nerdy Brother, just hanging out on the side doing technical stuff while Microsoft gives them a wedgie every time he comes back home.
But in reality this pairing is to keep both companies strong against Google, not Microsoft.
good, I dont have to find a giant winerack (Score:2)
to hold all those mac pro's
PowerPC (Score:2)
A lot of people here seem to forget that the PowerPC processor architecture that powered the Macs for over a decade was developed jointly by Apple and IBM (and Motorola).
My point: Apple and IBM working together is certainly not unheard of.
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Yeah, they worked together in the past, when the IBM name still meant something.
The 2014 IBM is a totally different animal. They laid off all their good people and replaced them with talentless Indians. Their reputation is in the shitter and they are shedding clients left and right because aforementioned Indians are not capable of performing the work promised to those clients.
I just hope IBM doesn't drag Apple down with them, when they finally enter their death spiral.
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I suppose there is a difference between the old International Business Machines and the new India Business Machines.
The death spiral would be extremely entertain to watch.
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We fully support IBM partnering with Apple to destroy it. The bottom line: Apple has no fallback, once the hipsters don't want ishiny any more, that's it. IBM will just keep selling bullshit consulting and support contracts to corps big and small.
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There are a Heluva lot of "hipsters" in the world running iDevices, and the great majority of them are very happy doing so.
Your attitude may vary.
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Trouble is, hipsters are all in advanced stages of getting saggy now. The ithing is the phone your mom has, now how cool is that?
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Yeah, Apple's products are too successful, so now they're not cool enough for you? And the people that buy Apple products are the "hipsters"? Weird.
How about - Apple's better at figuring out what people need and giving it to them in a high quality product than most tech companies, and they sell and support them better than most tech companies' distribution and support channels, so people really like using Apple products and their products sell extremely well, and people are willing to pay a premium for them
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There seems to be a significant number of people here who believe if a device isn't either very complex, or doesn't require or at least allow you to tear it apart and rebuild it, it is somehow "unworthy." For a lot of the rest of us, these are tools we use to do useful things, and the utility of the tool is in part based on how easy it is to use.
If that makes us "hipsters," I guess I'll have to grow a ponytail.
Where is the "Do not Want" tag? (Score:2)
Et tu, Lenovo? (Score:2)
Hello,
The question going through my mind, is what does this mean for Lenovo? Lenovo acquired IBM's Personal Computing Division in 2004, and announced at the beginning of 2014 that they had reached an agreement to acquire IBM's x86 server business.
The fact that IBM chose not to partner with Lenovo for developing all these apps and services for Lenovo's Windows and Android tablets and smartphones is downright bizarre.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
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The question going through my mind, is what does this mean for Lenovo? Lenovo acquired IBM's Personal Computing Division in 2004, and announced at the beginning of 2014 that they had reached an agreement to acquire IBM's x86 server business. The fact that IBM chose not to partner with Lenovo for developing all these apps and services for Lenovo's Windows and Android tablets and smartphones is downright bizarre.
On the contrary. Selling things to someone is different from marrying them. And who would IBM rather have a relationship with? An unstable trio (a Chinese maker of undistinguished hardware plus two rival OSes), or the one most profitable and popular maker of phones and tablets and the OS that runs on them? How many of IBM's customers and even employees prefer Lenovo Windows and Android tablets and smartphones to iPhones and iPads?
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Lenovo gets entrenched as the largest PC supplier then leverages it into largest server supplier. 1, 2, easy.
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The fact that IBM chose not to partner with Lenovo for developing all these apps and services for Lenovo's Windows and Android tablets and smartphones is downright bizarre.
Indeed. It's utterly bizarre that IBM would choose to partner with a US company that has a successful product with good market penetration, rather than a Chinese company with products that have yet to gain any traction.
Oh, wait...
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Lenovo is a manufacturing company that makes laptops and servers. They don't make software or do systems integration or mobile devices.
Why would IBM partner with them to integrate mobile devices into the enterprise?
Mac OS X on Power? (Score:2)
Not going to excite the enterprise (Score:1)
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The ad campaign should revolve around elephants wearing hornrimmed glasses and dancing tango while pressing one button mice with their trunks.
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Last century called and wants its one button mouse back.
Not going to excite the enterprise (Score:2)
'Microsoft, Google spar over federal contract" (04/11/11)
https://thehill.com/policy/tec... [thehill.com]
ie getting beyond FISMA and into enterprise - reps with military, intelligence, gov contractor like skills to move iPhone and iPad into US agencies.
iOS Management Tools for non-macs (Score:4, Interesting)
what about letting OS X server be on any VM runnin (Score:4, Interesting)
what about letting OS X server be on any VM running on any base hardware as well.
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And why would they want to do that? The purpose of Apple software is to sell Apple hardware. If there is a demand for VMs they are going to want those VMs to run on a reincarnated XServer.
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I'd settle for OS X Server tools that work across subnets. Time Machine backup server and print server, for instance.
These tools actually work quite well... as long as all your clients are all confined to a single subnet.
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Have you tried actually routing mDNS [cisco.com]? Those tools work just fine across subnets, as they are direct IP - it's just an AFP share for Time Machine and a standard CUPS print server. What it sounds like isn't working is Bonjour service discovery (mDNS), which uses multicast.
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Thanks for the pointer; unfortunately (or fortunately, usually!) I don't control the routers. But it might be worth a try to ask campus about enabling it - thanks!
I'm a department web guy / sysadmin. Our department is pretty big - we've got some or all of five different subnets to worry about. Mac (and iOS) use has been increasing a lot over the last four or five years, and we're at the point where managing each one as a one-off no longer makes sense.
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I'd settle for OS X Server tools that work across subnets. Time Machine backup server and print server, for instance.
These tools actually work quite well... as long as all your clients are all confined to a single subnet.
You should be able to configure it all by IP, which works great across subnets. I have a few OS X services configured that way.
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Oh boy, no.
AppleTalk has been dead for a decade. Everything on OS X is IP.
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The last system in my house that understands Appletalk runs Linux. (I had a HP laser printer for a time that apparently forgot how to do TCP/IP, so it would only respond to Appletalk. The only systems that had problems were the Windows ones.)
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It's actually a Bonjour/Zeroconf problem.
Re:iOS Management Tools for non-macs (Score:4, Informative)
It's a good thing that there is plenty of MDM solutions that fully support everything you want to do without having to ever touch a Mac then, isn't it? The only thing that requires a Mac is the iPhone Config Utility, and a Mac Mini fixes that nicely. And, now with touchless device enrollment [apple.com], you probably don't even need that anymore.
OS X Server is not required for management of iOS devices, and in fact only makes sense if you are a Mac shop and using Profile Manager to manage your OS X boxes. Otherwise, look at the many other solutions available that can also manage Android and WinMo in order to not lock yourself to a platform any more than necessary.
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I wonder if this means that Apple will finally port it's iOS management tools to run on something other than OS X server. Ever since Apple killed the XServe(and really even before that) this has been a major hinderance to wider scale enterprise adoption of iOS devices. The tools are actually quite good, but if you are forced to try to cram a bunch of mac minis somewhere or trying to get some mac pros in the server room, it's just a pain. Add to that lack of practical way to deploy OS X server instances on the cloud and you have enterprise customers just not interested in trying to screw around with iPhones. Hopefully this partnership will fix that.
They support third parties, a lot of which implement management on Windows and Linux servers.
http://www.enterpriseios.com/w... [enterpriseios.com]
IBM happens to be one of those vendors:
http://www-01.ibm.com/software... [ibm.com]
how about bringing back the Xserve (Score:2)
Minis and the iTrash aren't a substitute for a rack mounted server with redundant power supplies. Apple, it would be couch money for you to continue this product as well as a 17" laptop line, even if they aren't big sellers.
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Apple had not much use for their own servers back when they discontinued them. That certainly hasn't changed.
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I'd be happier with a deal with VMware, since VMware already has XServe3 and MacPro3 through 5 (and soon, 6) in their HCL.
Just let me run OS X Server on the blades I already have, FFS. We'll even buy a "VMware Edition" that costs more. Give me the choice.
Macbook (Score:2)
If this means I have to switch to an iPhone for my work phone, I am against this.
If this means I can ditch this giant Lenovo brick for a Powerbook during my next upgrade cycle, then I am all for this
Not sure which of the two would win, they are battling in my head...
Two micromicromicro managing control freaks. (Score:1)
The sparks will fly but first they will need to have a regular status meeting to determine the color of said sparks.
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Apple is providing tech support (Apple Care), IBM on site support.