Apple's IPad Wins Corporate Converts at Wells Fargo, SAP
Wells Fargo & Co. spent two years studying the iPhone before letting bankers use the device at work. Apple Inc.'s iPad, released in April, took just weeks to get cleared. — This time around, safeguards against security breaches …
Context & Ripple Effects
When the iPhone reached corporate buyers, Wells Fargo made bankers wait through a two-year security review before touching one. The iPad, released this April, cleared the same bank in weeks — a collapse of the approval cycle that suggests Apple built enough enterprise safeguards into the tablet from day one that IT departments no longer had to invent them. Bloomberg's report lands alongside confirmation that Wells Fargo and SAP have both signed off on the device for staff use.
The speed matters because it follows an unusually smooth security debut: back in April, the iPad passed through airport screening with barely a ripple, and web-metrics firm Net Applications' data showed iPad OS overtaking Android in usage share within three months of launch. Consumer momentum is arriving ahead of, rather than behind, corporate clearance.
First-order effects
- Wells Fargo bankers and SAP staff can put iPads on their desks immediately, making these firms early reference customers for Apple's push beyond the consumer market.
- Apple gains named enterprise deployments within a quarter of launch, shortening the sales pitch to other large companies that previously budgeted multi-year reviews like Wells Fargo's iPhone evaluation.
Second-order effects
- Rival tablet entrants — Android licensees and RIM among them — now face a bar set by Apple's pre-built security posture, forcing them to ship comparable enterprise controls at launch rather than iterating toward them.
- Security and mobile-device-management vendors gain a new customer base of corporations clearing consumer hardware, shifting spending from bespoke device builds toward policy-and-container tooling.
Third-order effects
- If approval cycles keep compressing from years to weeks, the default corporate posture shifts from banning consumer devices to governing them — a structural opening for employee-chosen hardware inside the enterprise perimeter.
- A pattern where consumer adoption precedes enterprise sign-off would invert the traditional enterprise-first product cycle, leaving regulators and CISOs adapting rules to devices already in circulation.
The trend: Consumer electronics is pulling enterprise IT along behind it, with security review cycles shrinking from multi-year studies to weeks as vendors bake safeguards into mass-market devices.