There’s a good article over at Fortune about how Apple’s iPhone — always intended as a consumer device — opened the floodgates for Apple’s invasion of the enterprise with mobile devices.
This topic was covered in a March Network World feature that detailed the almost immediate impact of the iPhone on enterprises. As Chris Hazelton, mobile and wireless research director for The 451 Group in Boston, said at the time, “The iPhone enabled Apple to enter a door into the enterprise. But that door has been opened by employees already using the device.”
In other words, use of the iPhone in the enterprise was demand-driven, not command-driven by IT (“these are the official tools you must use”).
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Here’s how Fortune contributor Aaron Levie put it:
“Workers are quickly recognizing the stark contrast between the computing that occurs in their personal lives and the business status quo. In turn, they’re bringing their own devices and apps to work, driving the emergence of an all-new technology landscape. This landscape isn’t being targeted by Apple in any real way; the complexity, scale, security and nuances of serving enterprises — not to mention the inherent need to work with all the major (non-Apple) platforms enterprises use — tend to keep Apple from building for this market. But even without making any direct enterprise play, Apple has had a profound influence on technology with its latest string of successes and by raising our standards along the way.”
Among those successes, of course, is the iPad, which is being adopted in the enterprise perhaps more aggressively than even the iPhone, particularly in the financial sector.
Good Technology, a provider of mobile-management software for enterprises, reported in July that more iPads were activated by its clients in the second quarter than Android devices, a first. When you consider the large number of Androids out there, not to mention Android’s nearly 50% market share, that’s quite an amazing statistic.
Even more amazing is that, combined with iPhones, Apple was responsible for 75% of mobile-device activations by Good Technology’s clients.
The days of Microsoft and BlackBerry dominating the enterprise are over. This creates challenges, as Levie writes: “[O]nce an enterprise adopts iPhones, iPads, and Macs en masse … or even Android devices for that matter, many of the existing applications — be it a communication tool from IBM or collaboration from Microsoft — serve less productive purposes given the new way people are working.”
But it also creates opportunities by allowing enterprise workers to choose their own productivity tools. And while the transition may be rough, the end-result should be happier, more productive workers. There’s not much downside to that.
