Nick Jones

Yesterday morning here at APAC Symposium my colleague Robin Simpson and I debated whether Apple was (or could ever become) an enterprise vendor. This was a light hearted session where I took the position that Apple products are suitable only for price insensitive fashion victims and Robin claimed that Apple was a serious enterprise vendor.

Whether or not you consider Apple as an enterprise vendor depends on your definition of “enterprise”, but my personal view is that you have to have a pretty relaxed definition before Apple fits it. Apple does the bare minimum for enterprises, they aren’t deeply committed to security, management, roadmaps, low TCO and so on. And they don’t open up the architecture of iPhone enough for 3rd parties to fill the holes. And before I’m lynched I must stress that’s an observation not a criticism. There’s no reason for Apple to do much for enterprises because 90% of iPhones are owned by consumers and only about 1% of enterprise PCs are Macs. Why should Apple invest a lot in something which is such a small part of its business? Apple is basically a proprietary vendor that wants to lock you in to their private APIs, technology, services and platforms. That’s a great business decision for Apple, you only have to look at their stunning Q4 results to see just how profitable it is. But living in that closed world may not necessarily be a sensible business decision for an enterprise.

One of the points I made in the debate is that a good way to understand what drives a vendor is to listen to what they say. So take a look at Apple’s web site where they list the “business” applications for iPhone. What’s on the list? Things like Fedex and UPS shipment apps, a business card reader, job search applications and so on. Basically toys. No mention of SAP, Oracle, business process support or anything that’s important to a real enterprise. And while we’re on the topic of what Apple says, Steve Jobs is reputed to have commented “Why join the Navy if you can be a pirate”. Piracy may be more fun, but would you rather give your treasured corporate data to the Navy or a pirate?

To be serious for a moment, Gartner’s official position on iPhone is that it’s is suitable for enterprises for what we term “appliance” mode applications but not for what we term “platform” mode applications. I.e. if what you want is a device for mobile email and web browsing iPhone is excellent. However we wouldn’t recommend enterprises to use it as a native application delivery platform. If you want more details of how we recommend enterprises use both iPhone and Macs there’s a lot of detailed advice on the Gartner web site (sorry, but we charge for it).

We conducted a quick audience poll both before and after the debate and in the end the audience split about 50:50. I.e. half of the people there believed in Apple as an enterprise vendor and half didn’t. I feel I did well because at the start the crowd were about 55:45 against me. But I guess the real message is that the opinions on both sides of this debate are pretty entrenched.