Apple and IBM’s partnership to bring devices and software solutions to the enterprise dates back to 2014. Now in a related development, the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is set to buy 11,000 iPhone SE smartphones that will include IBM’s software support.
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At the Jamf Nation User Conference, IBM has announced that it is open sourcing its Mac@IBM provisioning code. The code being open-sourced offers IT departments the ability to gather additional information about their employees during macOS setup and allows employees to customize their enrollment by selecting apps or bundles of apps to install.
Apple and IBM have announced an exciting expansion of the partnership started back in 2014 to bring enterprise apps to iOS devices. The latest step is designed to combine IBM’s powerful Watson AI system with Apple’s Core ML framework to create the smartest mobile apps yet developed.
The companies said that Coca-Cola is currently testing the setup …
After announcing a partnership with Apple back in 2014 to help bring enterprise apps and more to iOS, IBM today announced plans to accelerate the initiative with new ‘Garages’ that will serve as dedicated physical spaces to aid its corporate customers with the development of the MobileFirst iPhone and iPad apps:
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United Airlines is the latest company to work with IBM through their MobileFirst partnership with Apple to develop a suite of enterprise iOS apps. IBM says the enterprise iOS apps will be analytics-driven and run on over 50,000 iPhones and iPads used by “front-line employees” of United Airlines.
IBM reported some pretty impressive stats this week. Not least among them the fact that 73% of IBM employees – the company whose personal computer division was once almost synonymous with Microsoft – want a Mac as their next PC. The company is currently equipping its employees with Macs at the rate of 1300 people per week.
Indeed, IBM Japan has gone as far as making Macs standard-issue: any employee wanting a Windows machine instead has to make a special request justifying their need.
The company said that it had to overcome a number of assumptions – or prejudices – in order to make the transition …
Since partnering in 2014 to develop enterprise iOS apps under the “MobileFirst for iOS” banner, Apple and IBM have rolled out over 30 apps for various industries. Today the two companies introduced their first MobileFirst education app.
At the JAMF Nation User Conference (JNUC) this week, IBM’s Fletcher Previn delivered an update on the company’s rollout of Macs internally since it introduced Apple computers as an option for employees for the first time last year. In just over a year, IBM passed its original goal of deploying 50,000 Macs and is now at 90,000 internally. That makes it the largest enterprise Mac deployment anywhere, and Previn described how it’s helping the company cut costs.
Apple’s recently open-sourced programming language, Swift, may be seeing itself get adopted into Google’s Android platform in the future. Sources have told The Next Web that Google is “considering making Swift a ‘first class’ language for Android”.
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IBM today announced that it’s launching the first app that will run on its new Watson Health Cloud for ResearchKit — SleepHealth — as it also makes that platform available to researchers building their own apps that work with Apple’s ResearchKit.
Only months after Apple officially open-sourced Swift, IBM today is announcing that they are bringing Apple’s Swift programming language to the cloud. This makes IBM the first cloud provider enabling Swift application development server-side. IBM has also introduced a preview to a Swift runtime and a Swift Package Catalog to help with code sharing, and distribution.
The enterprise apps partnership between Apple and IBM has reached the goal the two companies set of bringing 100+ MobileFirst apps to the business and professional sectors. Many enterprise customers of course use these in conjunction with existing consumer apps.
IBM today announced it has delivered more than 100 IBM MobileFirst for iOS apps, as part of its partnership with Apple, to transform work across 14 industries and 65 individual professions, from wealth advisors to flight attendants, first responders, nurses and retail buyers. Additionally, the companies are expanding the portfolio to new markets including consumer products, automotive, aging and chemicals and petroleum.
The companies plan to make future apps even more powerful …
IBM has today unveiled their first public effort towards Swift, with the introduction of the IBM Swift Sandbox website. You can type lines of Swift code into the text editor on the left and then run the code on a Linux server, posting the output in the right column. This is all made possible by the fact that Swift is now open source, supporting Linux alongside iOS and OS X.
You can use the core Swift language as well as the standard library functions, so writing a formulaic mathematical problem (like the Fibonacci example above) is well within the scope of the web application. The concept is similar to the CodeRunner app from the Mac App Store, except it runs entirely off a cloud infrastructure.
While Apple didn’t have an official presence at the New York Times DealBook Conference yesterday (not counting former US Vice President Al Gore who sits on Apple’s board), the Cupertino company still got plenty of airtime on stage. IBM CEO Ginni Rometty explained her company’s relationship with Apple and how their partnership is beneficial for changing how iPhones and iPads are used, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings addressed Amazon’s recent move to block Apple TVs and Google Chromecasts from its store, and activist investor Carl Icahn shares how he discovered Apple, which he calls “the greatest company in the world.” Check out each video appearance below from yesterday’s conference to see what they had to say:
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IBM noted recently that it had seen dramatically lower usage of IT support by those employees who switched from Windows PCs to Macs. Apple has now quantified the cost savings this has generated, noting that the combination of reduced support and increased residual values of Macs meant that IBM saved $270 for every employee who made the switch.
IBM employees are offered the opportunity to swap out their Windows machines for Macs whenever they are due an upgrade. The company has committed to buying 50,000 MacBooks by the end of the year, and Business Insider notes that it has so far deployed 30,000 of them.
IBM is not alone in its enthusiasm for Macs in the enterprise sector, observed Tim Cook during yesterday’s earnings call …
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Apple CEO Tim Cook with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty
Deploying Macs to employees has helped IBM significantly reduce its IT staff and cut down on time and costs, the company’s VP of Workplace-as-a-Service Fletcher Previn explained at a recent talk during the JAMF Nation User Conference (JNUC). Previn offered some insight into how offering Macs has improved efficiency for the company’s internal IT staff since IBM for the first time started offering its employees Macs as an official alternative to PCs back in May.
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Interbrand has named Apple as the world’s most valuable brand for the third year running, estimating that it increased its total value by 43% in the past year to hit $170B. The company bases its estimates on a mix of the financial performance of the company, its ability to influence purchase decisions and the degree of brand loyalty it enjoys.
Google again took second place, seeing its value climb by 12% to $120B. Tech companies made up half of the top 10, Microsoft at #4, IBM at #5 and Samsung retaining 7th place. A similar brand equity ranking by Millward Brand back in May also gave Apple and Google the top two slots.
Apple first knocked Coca-Cola out of Interbrand’s top slot in 2013. It has also topped Fortune’s list of the world’s most admired companies for eight consecutive years.
Via The Verge
Apple CEO Tim Cook is one of a large number of tech leaders meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a visit to Seattle. It’s believed that the Chinese head of state is trying to enlist support from U.S. tech companies in his attempt to persuade President Obama not to implement threatened import restrictions against China. Obama had threatened the action over hacking and intellectual property theft by Chinese firms.
A report by the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property earlier this year (via the WSJ) found that intellectual property theft amounted to $300B a year, much of it carried out by hacking systems belonging to U.S. firms.
It’s been suggested that President Xi Jinping wants to emphasise the interdependence between U.S. tech companies and China as both a manufacturing base and a growing market. China is already a larger market for Apple than Europe, and looks set to overtake the USA, with Apple reporting 112% revenue growth in its Q3 earnings call.
Other tech CEOs present include Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, IBM’s Ginni Rometty, Intel’s Brian Krzanich, Microsoft’s Satyta Nadella and Qualcomm’s Steven Mollenkopf.
Photo: Pool/Getty Images
The simplistic view of tablets versus laptops has always been that the former are for consumption and the latter are for creation. Traditionally, laptops are more powerful, they offer greater storage, they have better keyboards, they run more capable software, they are better suited to multi-tasking … there have been plenty of reasons to choose one over a tablet. In the Apple world, to choose some kind of MacBook over an iPad.
But those reasons, like the Apple tech in question, grow slimmer each year. Sure, MacBooks are more powerful, but today’s iPads are no slouches – I’ve even done a little video editing on my iPad Air 2 – and the iPad Pro is almost twice as powerful. MacBooks do still offer more storage, but that’s less important in a world of cloud-based document storage and streaming media. The best add-on keyboards for iPads may not be quite up there with MacBook ones, but they are close – and most of the difference that does remain is due to size. OS X does offer more capable software than iOS, but there’s some pretty serious software on iOS these days. iOS 9 makes side-by-side multitasking something we can now do on an iPad as well as a MacBook. And with each release, Apple gets closer to parity between mobile and desktop as it integrates technologies from both operating systems across platforms.
So the gap between the two is far smaller than it used to be – and the iPad Pro is about the narrow the gap even more. Will the iPad Pro be the point at which an iPad becomes a viable alternative to a MacBook … ?
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Apple CEO Tim Cook with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty
Apple and IBM are continuing to develop their partnership first established just over a year ago as IBM announced today a new program to help large enterprises use Macs within their IT infrastructures. IBM’s MobileFirst Managed Mobility Services will allow its commercial clients to integrate Macs in their workplace with IBM supporting the deployment. Interestingly, IBM says it’s able to roll out the new program to commercial clients thanks to its own internal trial that we previously reported.
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Apple and IBM today unveiled 10 new enterprise apps across several industries including tools for government inspectors, business travelers and managers, and field service professionals for the first time. The latest apps bring the number of iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch apps built for the enterprise under Apple’s IBM MobileFirst for iOS partnership to 32 in total. Here are the new apps joining the list today:
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Apple CEO Tim Cook with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty
After inking a deal with Apple to push iOS devices and enterprise apps to its customers, IBM today started offering all employees Macs for the first time. We’ve seen the official IBM notice, and several IBM employees on Twitter are praising the decision after years of PC hell:
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Apple today updated its webpage for its enterprise app solutions to show that a few of the apps have been updated with Apple Watch support. Apple first launched the MobileFirst for iOS solutions last year through a partnership with IBM and most recently added 9 new apps in March bringing the total up to 22 across several industries.
The first three of Apple’s enterprise apps to receive Apple Watch support include: Hospital RN, Field Connect and Incident Aware.
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A low-tech scheme where postal workers from Japan Post check-in on how elderly residents are doing is about to go hi-tech with the help of iPads, reports the WSJ. The pilot scheme – one of the fruits of the Apple/IBM partnership – will see Japan Post hand out free iPads to 1,000 older citizens to allow closer and more frequent checks.
“By handing iPads to the elderly, we can closely check in on them more often—not only confirming if they are doing fine but also making sure that they are not involved in any trouble like a scam targeting the elderly,” a Japan Post official said on Thursday.
Data from the iPads will be analyzed by IBM’s Watson computer, reports Nikkei …
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