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Businesses Apple IT

Apple Partners With Cisco To Boost Enterprise Business 90

Posted by samzenpus from the working-better dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Apple and Cisco announced a partnership aimed at helping Apple's devices work better for businesses. Cisco will provide services specially optimized for iOS devices across mobile, cloud, and on premises-based collaboration tools such as Cisco Spark, Cisco Telepresence and Cisco WebEx, the companies said in a statement. "What makes this new partnership unique is that our engineering teams are innovating together to build joint solutions that our sales teams and partners will take jointly to our customers," Cisco Chief Executive Chuck Robbins said in a blog post.
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Apple Partners With Cisco To Boost Enterprise Business More

Apple Partners With Cisco To Boost Enterprise Business

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  • Making Some Changes to This Story (Score:3, Funny)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Monday August 31, 2015 @06:52PM (#50432523) Homepage Journal
    Apple partners with Crisco to make a delicious pie!

  • Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)

    by phayes ( 202222 ) on Monday August 31, 2015 @06:52PM (#50432525) Homepage

    Cisco Engineers massively prefer Macs over PCs to the point that those that use anything other than Macs are rare. By improving their products on Macs, they are helping their employees even before any clients are considered.

    • Sun Microsystems was that way too. Everyone had Macs (except for sales force). Then when we went to the Big-O, we all had to install the corporate XP image on VBox (or Fusion) to do our work...

      • I worked at a place once where whole floors of the QA building had Sparc Workstations. I guess we know why Sun failed on the desktop, now.

      • macs at sun? when was that?

        I was at sun right before oracle killed them and in engineering, it was all tower sun workstations. sunblade this and netra that (for those doing netra work).

        and at sgi, we had o2's and octanes.

        at DEC, we had decstations and vaxstations.

        I liked it when there was computer diversity like that. I really do miss using real unix boxes instead of (sigh) windows windows windows! in the corp world, you only get to pick win or apple, now.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Macrat ( 638047 )

          macs at sun? when was that?

          Right after Apple switched from PPC to Intel. There was so much demand for Mac laptops that IT spun up a program to provide them internally.

      • what is big o

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Bullshit, then why does cisco employees hate Macs so much that their employees constantly spit at people that have them? I live not far from their headquarters in San Jose, and their employees hate me and my family for using MacBooks. They hate us. One of them screamed at my daughter and made her cry recently. They hate us. I have never seen one of their kind with an Apple product. You can just tell their employees by the eyes. They always have such cruel eyes, like a Republican.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kolbe ( 320366 )

      Considering we just had Cisco LIVE! San Diego, I'll call bullshit on this as well. The number of Dell, Lenovo and other laptops/tablets was conservatively equal to or optimistically greater to Macs for several reasons:

      First and foremost: Most companies do not include Mac's in their company approved machine acquisition list.
      Second: They are STILL not natively compatible with a lot of software without running Fusion or similar.

      I will admit that they are popular machines, but I digress in stating they are not

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by mab ( 17941 )
        Funny, at Cisco LIVE! Melbourne Macs seemed to be in the majority. Our sales rep and engineer also use them

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kolbe ( 320366 )

          The San Francisco based "Cisco-ians" all use MacBooks for sure, but as I said, there were just as many official Cisco employees using Dell laptops to host sessions. I actually asked someone this morning why Cisco has a love for Apple and their response actually doesn't surprise me now that I know:

          "Because they (Apple) have a non-compete with us and they make good hardware, duh! Unlike, say Dell w/ NetGear & HP with 3Com/ProCurve, Apple doesn't make switches and routers that compete with our product line

    • Cisco Engineers massively prefer Macs over PCs to the point that those that use anything other than Macs are rare. By improving their products on Macs, they are helping their employees even before any clients are considered.

      I have no idea where you got this idea from. The vast majority of Cisco engineers that I know use Windows PCs for the simple reason that there is a much wider array of network analysis, management, and utilities for Windows. Not to mention drivers. Most of us are more interested in designing, configuring, and troubleshooting our networks and don't have time to mess around with UNIX drivers, etc. just to get a network tool to work.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by phayes ( 202222 )

        As I said elsewhere in this thread, I'm a Cisco partner & work regularly with their engineers & people sent from the US for workshops here in Paris. The users of non-Apple hardware are rare enough to be remarkable. As for your uniformed opinion that we don't have the tools on OS X to do our jobs, lets chalk that up to your ignorance of just what tools are available and an assumption on your part that if it isn't the same tool as under windows then it doesn't exist.

    • I was at cisco during the last year and, yes, it was amazing how many silver aluminum laptops I saw 'walking around'. 100:1 or 50:1 to pc's.

      while there, I took some employee training and one class was almost entirely international exchange students (there for a whole year at a time, I'm told). 99% of them had apple laptops.

      • How many were running OS X though? I know a few people who buy Apple hardware, but run a different main OS, just because the Apple hardware is better than 99% of what you can find in the PC notebook market and the 1% that is in the same league as Apple is just as, if not more, expensive.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by phayes ( 202222 )

          Everyone in my experience that uses Macs at Cisco also uses OSX as rMBPs are the most popular model used and only OSX has stable support for hot plugging thunderport devices. The people who prefer Linux/Windows use Dell/HPs. That said, everyone uses VMware so if they need Linux/windows its there too.

  • Cisco don't need no Apple badges.

  • Hey Apple if you want enterprise business (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Monday August 31, 2015 @07:50PM (#50432861)

    How about, well, learning to support an enterprise? Stop treating every device like it is a consumer toy. Offer some real management tools, don't require an Apple account to do everything on your computers, etc, etc, etc.

    It always amuses me when I see Apple talk about the enterprise space because they have done such a shit job supporting OS-X for the enterprise for so long. You can make it work, of course, and there are plenty of 3rd party tools, many very expensive, to help but it is all your own doing. Apple themselves seem to view each device as an island, property of a single consumer to be used as a toy and thrown away when the next shiny toy comes along.

    Of course what they really mean here is "We want big businesses to buy our stuff, but we don't want to actually go through the trouble of supporting them."

    • Offer some real management tools, don't require an Apple account to do everything on your computers, etc, etc, etc.

      Or honestly, you know, just... fix the broken crap. Take all the stuff that Apple does offer for business, and fix the bugs.

      Like take care of the bugs in Mail that cause it to not sync properly when mailboxes hit a certain size. Fix the bugs with Open Directory, Profile Manager, and mobile user account syncing. Speed up access to file servers, and fix the SMB problems that cause files to become locked and Finder to crash. Some of these problems have existed for years, and they're just not getting fixed

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kolbe ( 320366 )

        You forget that they have already seriously burned their customers by dropping the ball the way they did with the Apple Xserve and Xserve RAID... A good example of this is "The Tennis Channel" in Los Angeles. They bought millions of dollars worth of Xserve RAID and got severely burned on them when their promised "dual redundant" Xserve RAID's started failing left and right, without any recourse for recovery. I was working for a VAR when that went down and I can tell you that a number of customers would neve

      • I would be perfectly happy if they just said "Know what? OS-X is a home user OS. We don't support the enterprise. We are going to remove support for these enterprise features with the next version. Use something else." That would be great because then I could tell all the Macheads to suck it up and use Windows or Linux.

        However Apple likes to play at enterprise support, they've played at it for years. They act like they care, but as you note they half-ass it to the extreme.

        Even internally. I remember not lon

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kolbe ( 320366 )

      Apple will not be able to achieve proper support in the enterprise world... Enterprise/Federal customers didn't want a relationship with a "product", which is what Apple makes their money on. Enterprise/Federal customers want a relationship with a company, and they were willing to pay for that. On call, 24/7. I just don't see Apple doing that, ever.

    • The problem was that the prophet Steve (peace be upon him) hated the business market for some obscure personal reason and did everything he could to keep the company out of it. Now that Apple has fallen into secular hands, a revival of interest in the enterprise market may be in the works.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by seoras ( 147590 )

      They don't want it. Why would they? They are a consumer electronics company.

    • It always amuses me when I see Apple talk about the enterprise space because they have done such a shit job supporting OS-X for the enterprise for so long. You can make it work, of course, and there are plenty of 3rd party tools, many very expensive, to help but it is all your own doing. Apple themselves seem to view each device as an island, property of a single consumer to be used as a toy and thrown away when the next shiny toy comes along.

      Then explain, for example, THIS [apple.com] and THIS [apple.com] (the latter having existed for well over a decade, and which can not only be used to admin however many Macs you can throw at it; but also Windows and Linux systems). Oh, and the Administraton Console for ARD (Apple Remote Desktop) costs a whopping $69. The Client-side is free. Hardly "expensive".

      So, the only reason your think there isn't any "corporate" support for Apple systems/devices is because you haven't bothered to look for the two minutes it took to find th

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by tim_q54 ( 210947 )

      Of course what they really mean here is "We want big businesses to buy our stuff, but we don't want to actually go through the trouble of supporting them."

      That strategy has worked really well for Dell...

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday August 31, 2015 @07:57PM (#50432905)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by cosm ( 1072588 )
      +5 Experience. How much you wanna bet the userbase today doesn't even get the joke.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by seoras ( 147590 )

      I worked on IOS for 12 years and iOS for the last 3 years.
      Head hunters love me. T
      They skim my Linkedin profile, failing to read the details, and get into a frenzy thinking I've been writing Apps for iPhone since 1994. :)

    • They're going to put iOS on their IOS so they can...

  • These devices don't belong on an enterprise network anyway. They're allowed on a guest network and that's it.

    Who in their right mind is going to allow these personal devices on a company network? Haven't we seen enough bad things happen with stuff like this?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jo_ham ( 604554 )

      Funny, you seem to think that products can only be bought for personal use.

      What, I wonder, do you think this deal is designed to address? Perhaps it has something to do with wanting to make iOS devices more enterprise-friendly (they already have rudimentary enterprise support with curated app stores and local app deployment, but you think this chicken and egg problem shouldn't be solved because they're "consumer devices".

      Whoever would buy an automobile! The roads are designed for horses and carts! There are

  • None of that is Apple's Enterprise Problem (Score:3)

    by rshol ( 746340 ) on Tuesday September 01, 2015 @06:35AM (#50434875)

    Most people who work in enterprises don't work in IT so they don't care about admin tools etc. Most people work in marketing, sales, accounting, finance, logistics or manufacturing and all the software for all those departments runs on Windows. Middle market accounting software for Mac? Does not exist. Manufacturing/inventory control software for Mac? Nope. Contractor estimating/job costing? You get the picture.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jo_ham ( 604554 )

      Right, but who said anything about changing that? They just want to make iOS devices work more effectively in an enterprise setting - that means tablets, phones etc.

      There's no reason that iPads (for example) couldn't be used as handy video conference devices, especially at remote/off-site/smaller sites alongside all the current IT infrastructure.

      • Yeah, you know what would be really nice? If Apple wrote some good apps for other operating systems.

        Licensing 3rd party software for AirPlay and AirPrint services in a Windows network is stupid and on top of that it doesn't work all that well.

        Microsoft makes really good apps for Apple products, it would be awfully nice if Apple returned the favor.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by JazzLad ( 935151 )
          You can get iTunes & Quicktime for Windows ...

          ducks!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jo_ham ( 604554 )

          So Apple is a software company now?

          Also, what do you think this partnership is, exactly, if not to improve third-party iOS integration?

    • Most people who work in enterprises don't work in IT so they don't care about admin tools etc. Most people work in marketing, sales, accounting, finance, logistics or manufacturing and all the software for all those departments runs on Windows. Middle market accounting software for Mac? Does not exist. Manufacturing/inventory control software for Mac? Nope. Contractor estimating/job costing? You get the picture.

      ORLY?

      Twenty years ago, that was definitely the case. Not anymore. Here are but a few examples:

      Productivity/Project Management [omnigroup.com] BTW, this has been around for many years.

      Contact Management/Planning/Marketing [marketcircle.com]

      Accounting [accountedge.com] (also has been around for DECADES)

      Manufacturing/Inventory Control/ERP [xtuple.com] (VERY Robust, been around for years. Cross-Platform, Semi-Open Source) I write ERP software for a living, and this is GOOD stuff!!!

      Job Costing [softwareadvice.com]. XTuple does that, too; but here is but one example: A highly-rated Job Cos

  • Hold on. Is it April first? Because that's GOT to be a joke.

    Apple doesn't want, and cannot handle enterprise business.

    Because enterprise customers, spending millions, aren't as forgiving of Apple's little "oopsies" the way their fanboy userbase is.
    And having technicians constantly going "Well try this piece of software and see if it does what you want" would get old quickly.

    The Mac developer base couldn't support it (bless their eclectic little hearts...)

    Now the elephant in the room. Apple's inherent und

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