BANGALORE: Apple’s increasing productivity and innovation and it has always been in the limelight. IBM will be selling Apple iPads and iPhones on monthly installments to enterprises in India, reports Economic Times.
Will Duckworth, IBM's vice president and partner for Asia Pacific, said ET "Under the arrangement with Apple, we can resell all existing Apple mobile devices, activate them and deploy and support them for two to three years. Customers can pay per year or per month — so there will be no capital cost for the customer."
Kiran Kumar, research manager, client devices, at IDC India said, "The partnership will enable Apple to make a strong bid to enterprise users."
He added,” With software and hardware cost bundled with easy payment options, Apple products can become attractive to small and mid-size businesses too; this could potentially help Apple build market share on the rising commercial tablet business in India."
Recently Apple and IBM revealed the first 10 of some 150-odd apps that IBM is developing on the Apple platform. And IBM is likely to resell iOS devices, which Apple still sells in India.
The market share for Apple iPad has reduced rapidly. The Worldwide shipments fell from 26.04 million units in the first quarter of its fiscal 2014 to 12.32 million units in the fourth.
"I'm sure that IBM's partnership with Apple will improve the quality of enterprise apps on the mobile platform," said Vinod Sivarama Krishnan, CIO at Wal-Mart India. "Though this initiative may not result in a quantum leap over currently available enterprise apps in pure functionality terms, it will certainly increase usage and universal applicability of those applications by extending them to IOS-based devices."
"I think with Apple and IBM partnership, the enterprise mobility space is up for the next level of evolution in terms of UI (user interface) experience," said Girish Rao, head IT and business analytics at Marico."The usage of IBM Apple apps would be similar to the ones in the Android platform to start with, but I expect the whole space is up for a revolution."
Analysts believe that Apple devices are suitably secure for enterprise users and require lesser maintenance.
"Over the past year, we've noticed an uptake in enterprise mobility pilot projects where tablets are considered for functions such as sales-force automation, point-of-sale interactions or collecting KYC documents.
However many of these pilots were not successful, primarily because of a lack of balance between affordability and manageability of these gadgets," said IDC's Kumar. "This is where Apple IBM partnership can succeed."
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