From Apple’s press release:
Apple® and IBM today deliver the first wave of IBM MobileFirst for iOS solutions in a new class of made-for-business apps and supporting cloud services that bring IBM’s big data and analytics capabilities to iPhone® and iPad® users in the enterprise. IBM MobileFirst for iOS solutions are now available to enterprise customers in banking, retail, insurance, financial services, telecommunications and for governments and airlines, thanks to an unprecedented collaboration between Apple and IBM. IBM clients today announcing support for IBM MobileFirst for iOS solutions include: Citi, Air Canada, Sprint and Banorte.
“What we’re delivering aims directly at the new quest of business—smart technologies that unlock new value at the intersection of big data and individual engagement,” said Bridget van Kralingen, senior vice president, IBM Global Business Services. “Our collaboration combines IBM’s industry expertise and unmatched position in enterprise computing, with Apple’s legendary user experience and excellence in product design to lift the performance of a new generation of business professionals.”
“This is a big step for iPhone and iPad in the enterprise, and we can’t wait to see the exciting new ways organizations will put iOS devices to work,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “The business world has gone mobile, and Apple and IBM are bringing together the world’s best technology with the smartest data and analytics to help businesses redefine how work gets done.”
The apps are vertical in nature, targeting specific industries such as travel, banking, and insurance. They are built with a combination of IBM’s vertical savvy and Apple design skills. These are the first of the so-called MobileFirst apps:
• Plan Flight (Travel and Transportation) addresses the major expense of all airlines—fuel—permitting pilots to view flight schedules, flight plans, and crew manifests ahead of time, report issues in-flight to ground crews, and make more informed decisions about discretionary fuel.
• Passenger+ (Travel and Transportation) empowers flight crews to offer an unmatched level of personalized services to passengers in-flight—including special offers, re-booking, and baggage information.
• Advise & Grow (Banking and Financial Markets) puts bankers on premise with their small business clients, with secure authorization to access client profiles and competitive analyses, gather analytics-driven insights to make personalized recommendations, and complete secure transactions.
• Trusted Advice (Banking and Financial Markets) allows advisors to access and manage client portfolios, gain insight from powerful predictive analytics—in the client’s kitchen or at the local coffee shop, rather than the advisor’s office—with full ability to test recommendations with sophisticated modeling tools all the way to complete, secure transactions.
• Retention (Insurance) empowers agents with access to customers’ profiles and history, including an analytics-driven retention risk score as well as smart alerts, reminders, and recommendations on next best steps and facilitation of key transactions like collection of e-signatures and premiums.
• Case Advice (Government) addresses the issue of workload and support among caseworkers who are making critical decisions, one family or situation at a time, on the go. The solution adjusts case priorities based on real-time analytics-driven insights, and assesses risk based on predictive analysis.
• Incident Aware (Government) converts an iPhone into a vital crime prevention asset, presenting law enforcement officers with real-time access to maps and video-feeds of incident locations; information about victim status, escalation risk, and crime history; and improved ability to call for back-up and supporting services.
• Sales Assist (Retail) enables associates to connect with customer profiles, make suggestions based on previous purchases and current selections, check inventory, locate items in-store, and ship out-of-store items.
• Pick & Pack (Retail) combines proximity-based technology with back-end inventory systems for transformed order fulfillment.
• Expert Tech (Telecommunications) taps into native iOS capabilities including FaceTime® for easy access to expertise and location services for route optimization to deliver superior on-site service, more effective issue resolution and productivity as well as improved customer satisfaction.
I think Tim Cook has been brilliant about stepping back (since Jobs handed over reigns), taking a breath, and then asking very smart questions about ways to grow the ecosystem. In this case, where do we drill down to unlock huge new potential hardware buys that translate into new, lifelong growing customer bases.
How did Apple’s partnership with IBM help this happen, though? Plenty of gigantic businesses have proprietary custom iOS apps, some of them developed by “enterprise” IT vendors like HP, and it didn’t involve Apple at all.
This still just seems like a silly marketing thing that has little or no substance behind it.
apple helped this happen by partnering w/ them and asking them to build it, and then sell it to enterprise. almost certainly they provided expert technical assistance to help IBM pull off the suite.
or it’s all just silly marketing. yeah.
But other companies build internal apps all day every day. HP builds apps for their customers all day every day that run on iOS. I’m failing to see what the Apple-IBM partnership brings that is so revolutionary and is worthy of so much spilled ink in the Apple press beyond what numerous companies are already doing with their iOS projects. IBM didn’t need Apple to “ask them” to build these apps. What does that even mean? I’m sure Apple made technical resources available to IBM in terms of developer support, but did they offer better access than normal devs? Did they let IBM do things on iOS that nobody else can do?
The main difference is IBM is expected to bring customers to Apple and iOS, rather than the other way around.
1) IBM is probably making these apps they’ve developed available exclusively on iOS, which means that companies that choose to use IBMs tools will have to buy iPads, which is good for Apple.
2) IBM has access to some of the most mind-bogglingly large sets of data on the planet that has likely allowed them to build better versions of these apps than HP or other competitors (though certainly not a guarantee).
3) The name IBM still carries a significant amount of weight in certain technology sectors where HP does not. For example, IBM is still the leading company in machine intelligence.
4) Marketing is only silly if it doesn’t work. Time will tell on this one.