I wonder if 2013 will be the year of Apple hitting it big within the enterprise space. Now when I say this I do not mean the small businesses out there, yes you know the small marketing, designers or development companies or businesses that have an image to build up – I mean the big scale enterprises with 200+ machines to look after, the companies that need to think of the end user, the supportability and operational impact of consumer grade devices (BYOD or IT Consumerisation).
This may sound negative – to the contrary as I am an avid Apple follower, they are sexy, powerful and leaps ahead of their competitors (at premium prices), all my machines at home are Apple Mac’s of some shape or age and I have had an iPhone since the original (now on 4S). I would love for the companies I work for to say “go spec up your Mac” (wonder what I would go for umm this wont take any time at all – Mac Book Pro 13″ + Retina, 16GB and i7 with 756 SSD) but the issue here is the long term support, warranty and training their IT staff to support it. Go for it Apple and good luck.
When you look at companies like HP, DEll and Lenovo they all offer 3 year hardware, same or next day and that’s either parts or engineer. Now compare this to Apple, firstly you need to purchase a CarePlan to extend it and then take it into a Apple Store – sorry what.!!! Take it into a Store..! Yes there are resellers and companies that can offer you support but to me that is not the point.
So when I came over this report from Tech Crunch that explains the details of a Forrester Report estimates Apple will sell over $39 billion (yes Billion Dollars) of Macs and iPads to businesses over the next 2 years it got me thinking of the above.
This brings us onto the management of these devices mainly known as Mobile Device Management (MDM), these products allow additional control and management to the enterprise for setting policies like application control, device wiping or encryption. Having have experience with the top rated MDM providers (Mobile Iron, Zenprise and AirWatch) I can safely say these platforms work and work very well. Below is a small snippet from the Gartner Magic Quadrant of 2012 that shows the market leaders:
