From Berries to Apples

While we continue with the “Year of the Dragon” celebrations in China, we woke up last week Wednesday to hear the impressive news about Apple’s latest 4Q11 results.  But what is of particular importance for the Outsourcing industry is what Peter Oppenheimer, Apple senior VP and CFO, mentioned during the earnings call, when he told the analysts that “many” Fortune 500 companies “are developing and deploying mission-critical iPhone apps to help improve productivity and give employees secure and immediate access to information anywhere.”

This statement is huge for the IT Enterprise industry since, currently, the majority of the applications developed and deployed in the Apple App store were targeted to consumers or end (aka B2C), with just a small fraction of those targeted at employee enterprise applications, or B2E. But several questions remain in the air with regards to how Apple is working with these “Fortune 500” companies in order to close the gap on the key problems of iOS Apps, going from security concerns, a closed development environment and most importantly, a centralized, unique and tightly controlled distribution model called the App Store. Some enterprise solutions solve some of the above-mentioned problems mentioned, like AirWatch, MobileIron and Good Technology; however, they are not native, as is the case of Blackberry.

Blackberry was the mobile device that we’ve all loved since the early 2000’s—converting many into ‘crack’-berry users. It revolutionized the mobile business of the enterprise and until this day, it’s the most robust and secure platform deployed across the world. The problem was that RIM dismissed the crucial user experience component, and when Apple released the iPhone with a complete orientation on the customer, it was too late for RIM to play “catch up.”  

So, what comes next for the enterprise and the vendors that are jumping into the mobile environment? Gartner defines 2012 as the year that mobile enterprise will take off, and its prediction is based on the iPadization in the enterprises—not on Android, RIM or Windows 7. With this, we will see more Berries start to transform into Apples as the year passes by, along with “many” organizations joining the reality based on Mr. Oppenheimer’s statement.

* Image taken from http://appmodo.com