Apple, IBM set aside rivalry to boost each other’s businesses

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple and International Business Machines (IBM) are setting aside a three-decade-old rivalry that started at the dawn of the personal-computing era to work together to get more businesses to embrace iPhones and iPads.

The deal gives Apple access to an IBM sales force that will recommend Apple’s devices to customers in industries such as health care and banking, which have never been priorities for the consumer-focused iPhone maker.

IBM gets a boost in a long-running effort to sell software and services to companies seeking to manage workers’ smartphones and tablets. “We really recognised almost simultaneously that we could be uniquely helpful to one another’s strategy and that there was literally no overlap,” said Ms Bridget Van Kralingen, IBM’s senior vice-president of global business services.

The partnership helps Apple pursue a bigger slice of the market for corporate users of wireless devices. While many businesses allow the use of iPhones and iPads for checking e-mail and other tasks, some longtime users of PCs running Microsoft’s Windows software have remained reluctant to adopt its gadgets.

For IBM, the alliance may aid the company’s efforts to catch up after watching other technology companies — including Apple — seize upon the growing popularity of mobile devices.

“They’re now strongly associated with the premium mobile platform and mobile devices,” Mr Frank Gillett, an analyst at Forrester Research, said of Apple. “If you want to do any-thing interesting in the enterprise, you now have to check with IBM on what they’re doing with Apple.”

Apple has already recognised the potential of the corporate market, touting that its devices are used by employees at 98 per cent of Fortune 500 companies. Deutsche Bank has almost 20,000 iPhones, while Siemens has 30,000, Apple said in April.

“This is a shot in the arm for IBM and a great validation of Apple in the enterprise space, where they already are a huge success,” Mr Aaron Levie, chief executive officer of cloud-storage company Box, said in an interview.

The partnership — announced with a press release that included a picture of Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty walking together at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California — would be surprising to those following the companies three decades ago.

IBM and Apple were bitter rivals during the early days of the PC. Apple’s famous “1984” Super Bowl television commercial to introduce the Macintosh computer compared IBM to George Orwell’s totalitarian Big Brother. The competition eased as IBM abandoned the PC business and instead focused on software and services geared for corporate clients. Mr Cook also worked at IBM for more than a decade before joining Apple.

While the companies’ agreement targets business customers, it puts IBM back in the position of selling consumer products — something the company left behind in 2005 with the sale of its PC unit to Lenovo Group.

A key element of the Apple-IBM deal is developing mobile-centric software tools for businesses. While smartphones have become ubiquitous, in business they are primarily used for checking e-mail or calendars. That will expand to include more sales functions and day-to-day work flow, such as getting approvals from a manager, said Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond. BLOOMBERG