{{IBM’s staff will sell Apple devices to its business customers, and the two companies will work together to develop applications tailored to work with IBM’s data analytics and cloud services, the companies said in a statement today. }}
Apple also will offer customer-service support for the apps.
The partnership helps Apple pursue a bigger slice of the market for corporate users of smartphones and tablets.
Working with its erstwhile foe may also help Armonk, New York-based IBM chase other technology giants — including Apple — that have done a better job seizing on the mobile-computing boom.
“This is a shot in the arm for IBM and a great validation of Apple in the enterprise space, where they already are a huge success,” Aaron Levie, chief executive officer of cloud-storage company Box Inc., said in an interview.
With the deal, Apple gains a large sales force that will push its mobile devices to companies, while IBM, whose sales have been stagnating, adds the cachet of being partners with one of the best known and most popular consumer-electronics brands.
“We really recognized almost simultaneously that we could be uniquely helpful to one another’s strategy and that there was literally no overlap,” Bridget Van Kralingen, IBM’s senior vice president of global business services, said in an interview. “It’s moved incredibly quickly and smoothly.”
{{Business Customers}}
The success of the iPhone and iPad has helped Apple gain more traction with business customers that had long shunned the company in favor of machines running Microsoft Corp.’s Windows software.
Deutsche Bank AG has almost 20,000 iPhones, while Siemens AG has 30,000 iPhones, Apple said in April.
Employees at more than 98 percent of Fortune 500 companies are using the iPhone or iPad for their work, the company said. To gain more customers, Apple has been adding new security and software tools for makers of business software.
Apple and rival Samsung Electronics Co. are seeking to further displace BlackBerry Ltd., which once held a strong grip on the corporate market. Shares of BlackBerry fell 3.4 percent to $10.92 in late trading after Apple’s deal with IBM was announced.
{adapted from Bloomberg}
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