Apple + IBM add 8 new enterprise iOS apps, first for industrial products & healthcare industries
Zac Hall / 9to5Mac :
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months after Apple built a dedicated US sales force to push the partnership into healthcare, retail, finance, and manufacturing (Apple's dedicated IBM sales team), the pipeline is delivering product: eight new enterprise iOS apps, including the first built specifically for the industrial products and healthcare industries.
The healthcare entry lands just ahead of a wave of medical-sector tie-ups — weeks later IBM announced deals bringing Watson into healthcare with Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic (IBM's Watson healthcare deals) — making these apps the front edge of a broader enterprise push rather than a one-off.
First-order effects
- Enterprise customers in industrial products and healthcare gain iOS-native workflow apps where none existed before, giving Apple's sales team a concrete vertical-specific catalog to sell against traditional enterprise software vendors.
Second-order effects
- Rival enterprise vendors respond by cutting their own Apple deals rather than competing head-on: SAP follows a year later with an iOS SDK on HANA Cloud Platform (SAP's iOS partnership), effectively ratifying the model instead of fighting it.
Third-order effects
- The vertical-by-vertical expansion points toward the consumer device maker becoming an industrial operating layer: by 2017 the same logic produces a General Electric partnership for factory and machinery apps (Apple's GE industrial apps partnership), suggesting each new industry app widens the beachhead for the next.
The trend: Consumer device platforms are entering the enterprise market through vertical partnerships with legacy vendors, turning smartphones into industry-specific operational tools.