GigaOM » Apple

Biz spending on Macs, iPads could hit $19B in 2012

Erica Ogg — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 19:26:06 +0000

Apple’s been a beneficiary of the BYOD craze that has hit corporate IT departments everywhere. The policy resulted in lots of workers bringing not only iPhones and iPads into the office, but Macs too. But BYOD isn’t the only reason Apple’s presence is growing at your office; IT departments are also buying more Macs and iPads for employees. That’s according to a new report from Forresterpublished Friday.

In putting together the Global Tech Market Outlook for 2012 and 2013, Forrester talked to 46 major IT vendors as well as agencies like the IMF, U.S. Commerce Department and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and now estimates over the course of 2012, Apple will sell $9 billion worth of Macs and $10 billion worth of iPads to enterprise companies worldwide. That’s up from the estimated $6 billion spent on Macs and $6 billion on iPads in 2011. Forrester calls its corporate growth “the big surprise of 2011,” especially because Apple has never actively or directly targeted business users. The report notes:

The Apple assault on the corporate market has so far taken place without much formal Apple support, and probably without Apple itself understanding its full extent. That’s because corporate adoption of Apple products has been largely clandestine, occurring through three channels.

Those three channels?

IT departments buying iPads. In October, Apple reported 93 percent of the world’s Fortune 500 companies are trying out or actively issuing iPads to employees. (Expect an update on this number on Jan. 24.)
Smaller companies buying both Macs and iPads for employees. These types of companies tend to purchase devices that employees can use both at work and at home, Forrester says.
Workers BYOD-ing iPads and Macs, then harassing their IT department to support them. (For more on that, see my GigaOM Pro piece here — subscription required.)

While Apple continues to make inroads into the corporate IT market, traditional PCs are expected to lose ground: Forrester estimates global corporate spending on Windows-based PCs and tablets will decline 3 percent next year, as you can see in the chart below:

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Finance, healthcare jobs most likely to allow personal iPhones, iPads

Erica Ogg — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 05:00:22 +0000

It’s not news that more and more businesses are allowing workers to bring their smartphones and sometimes tablets of choice to the office. But would you have guessed that two of the most highly regulated industries (finance and healthcare) would be the ones leading the charge for this BYOD (bring your own device) trend? That’s what a study undertaken by Good Technology, makers of enterprise mobile security software, found. Good’s data also shows that size of the company is not an impediment to making BYOD work, and that even when workers are paid a small stipend toward a device they bring, businesses save money overall by having more productive workers.

Good’s survey includes responses from 400 of Good’s largest customers, with 2,000 employees or more, in October. And according to the results BYOD is being very clearly embraced: 70 percent of respondents said they currently let employees bring their own smartphone (or tablet) to work, 19 percent are considering allowing it, and just 9 percent said they had no plans for BYOD programs.

Being a large company isn’t a deterrent: among those polled, 80 percent that allow BYOD have 2,000 employees or more, 60 percent have 5,000 or more and 35 percent have 10,000 or more. And of those companies, half allow employees to bring their own smartphone or tablet to work as long as they pay for all the costs, while 45 percent offer some kind of stipend for employees to use toward buying a device or a way to expense monthly costs.

BYOD is not as popular among retailers and government agencies, according the the study. But the reason that it’s finding so much success at highly regulated industries, like healthcare and finance — which have very high bars for security and compliance — is the existence of software available that allays those concerns. (Like Good’s, hence their survey.) New mobile software can be installed on personal iPhones or Android phones that “create strong separation between business data and what’s happening on the personal side of the device,” John Herrema, SVP of Corporate Strategy at Good, said in an interview. That separation helps hospitals, banks and other meet compliance standards like HIPAA, PCI data security and more.

“Once you solve that problem, we’re not surprised that [these industries] are the broad adopters,” he added. “They’re very much information-driven, knowledge-driven, real-time, access-to-data-driven,” which having your favorite mobile device in your pocket can help with.

As far as what kinds of devices these workers are bringing in when given the choice, it’s not a huge shock: “Overall, our customers are absolutely activating iOS and Android to the exclusion of everything else we support,” said Herrema. “Historically, we’ve supported Windows Mobile, Symbian, some are even on old Treo devices. Bu these days it’s all about iOS and Android all night.”

The exact breakdown among smartphones brought to work (among Good’s customers) is: 60 percent are iPhones, and 40 percent Android. In tablets, it’s not that close: 95 percent of tablets brought to work are iPads, just 5 percent are Android-powered.

For those companies or IT managers hesitant about the practice, consider this: BYOD can help you save money. It’s fairly obvious that by having employees buy their own smartphone instead of issuing them a BlackBerry you’re going to see savings in your IT budget. But even those companies giving a stipend are seeing the financial benefit.

While Good found that most companies offer a stipend of $61 or more per month for mobile devices, some are varying stipend level by role of the employee. By doing that, the organization can assign how much productivity benefit they think a person with their own mobile device brings — for instance, is it worth more to have a sales director with a mobile device or a general office worker? “So they put a dollar value on that role, which puts them in complete control of the ROI calculus,” said Herrema.

Companies can save money by not buying smartphones anymore, but they get more out of each employee in terms of productivity when they have a device they can use and that they want to use.

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Mac making a move in the enterprise, grew 44 percent in Q3

Erica Ogg — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 20:04:37 +0000

It’s a pattern we’ve seen for several quarters: Apple’s Mac sales post double-digit percentage increases as the broader PC market limps along with single-digit growth. So it’s not a huge surprise to see the Mac again making progress in its battle for market share. In a report issued Thursday, Needham & Co. analyst Charlie Wolf said the Mac had reached 5.2 percent of worldwide computer sales. While that seems like a tiny slice of a huge industry — and it is — it’s the largest chunk of PC market share Apple has owned in 15 years.

Yes, 5.2 percent is significant for Apple, the computer side of which brings in huge profits for the company, but maintains a relatively low sales share compared to the HPs, Dells, Acers and Lenovos of the world. But the momentum is Apple’s right now. It’s growing both in the consumer space, where it was up 24.6 percent compared to overall PC growth of 5.3 percent, and perhaps more surprisingly, in the workplace.

Needham says Macs’ share of enterprise computer sales grew 43.8 percent during the third quarter of this year, compared to overall enterprise PC growth of 4.8 percent. And it’s been happening for a few quarters in a row. In a note to investors, Wolf wrote:

“What we initially viewed as a one-quarter blip in the business market has emerged as a durable pattern.”

Credit: Needham & Co.

The growth, as the chart shows, isn’t coming in just one area, but is spread throughout the wider enterprise market for computers. Apple saw decent gains in every sector, with the exception of government purchases, but saw significant growth particularly in “very large” and “large” businesses.

Macs are no longer much of a rarity in the workplace. For many years, there were valid reasons Macs were used mainly in the publishing and creative spaces, since software compatibility made it hard to use them elsewhere. But as consumer adoption of Macs has increased steadily in the past few years, many employees are either asking their employers in all industries to buy them the same Macs they’re using at home, or they’re just bringing in their MacBook from home to the office. And increasingly, IT departments are letting them.

Last month, analyst firm Forrester made waves by changing course and strongly recommending businesses let their employees use computers running Mac OS X, because they have “gained a reputation for reliability and low maintenance,” according to Forrester. The report found 22 percent of enterprise businesses foresee the use of Macs owned by employees “increasing significantly.”

Be sure to grab a ticket to our Net:Work conference on December 8 in San Francisco to learn more about the changing face of IT and the ongoing consumerization of workplace tech.

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Survey: For enterprise workers, iPhone beats BlackBerry

Erica Ogg — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 19:54:49 +0000

Enterprise has long been the bastion of RIM and its BlackBerry devices, but it has been infiltrated by Apple and its challenger, the iPhone. According to a quarterly survey of enterprise companies by commercial Wi-Fi provider iPass, the iPhone has a 45-percent market share of mobile employee usage, passing the undisputed king BlackBerry, for the first time.

IPass’s Mobile WorkForce Report, released Wednesday, gets its data from a survey of more than 2,300 mobile enterprise workers at 1,100 companies between the end of September and the end of October. We know many of the world’s richest companies are on the iPhone bandwagon already; Apple said last month that “90 percent of Fortune 500 companies” are deploying iPhones for their workers. But iPass’s report gives a bit of a broader picture of differently sized companies that have iPhones on their network.

IPhones’ popularity for mobile workers isn’t just a result of taking market share from RIM. The overall market is expanding too. From the report:

Today 95 percent of mobile employees have smartphones, up from 85 percent in 2010, with 91 percent using their smartphone for work — a 26 percent rise compared to 2010.

At our Mobilize conference in September, a panel of mobile IT execs declared 2011 the year smartphones cemented their place in the enterprise. “2011 was the year mobile IT was born,” Bob Tinker, CEO of MobileIron, said at the time. “It was the year the IT industry figured out mobile, and it’s the year that mobile figured out IT … Every small, medium and large enterprise around the world is going to be deploying smartphones and tablets at scale over the next 12 to 18 months.”

Tablets, according to iPass, are on the rise, but have a ways to go to be at the smartphone level of penetration in the enterprise, with 44 percent of those surveyed using an iPad at work, compared to 33 percent in the second quarter of this year.

The reason mobile devices are surging in adoption among enterprise workers isn’t necessarily because IT budgets are expanding. According to iPass:

This is due in part to the adoption of “bring your own device” policies by enterprises. Currently 42 percent of mobile employees use individually-liable smartphones for work, up from 34 percent last year.

BYO smartphone policies have grown rapidly in the last year thanks to IT departments being faced with people wanting to use their own iPhone or Android phone from home for work, something RIM never figured out. “RIM never got people to want to pay for the device themselves,” Julie Palen, SVP of enterprise telecom expense management company Tangoe, said in September. “That’s what Apple brought. And Android and Google followed.”

To learn more about the needs of the mobile work force, be sure to attend our Net:Work conference in San Francisco on Dec. 8.

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Forrester to your IT dept: Let them use Macs

Erica Ogg — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:11:10 +0000

Forrester made some waves in the IT world Thursday morning when it released a report strongly urging large enterprise companies to let their employees use Macs at work, or as they phrased it “it’s time to repeal prohibition.” That’s kind of a big deal since the analyst firm has for years recommended the exact opposite. So why the sudden change?

Employees are not only asking IT departments for Macs at work, they’re bringing their own into the office. The Forrester report finds that 22 percent of enterprise businesses foresee the use of Macs owned by employees “increasing significantly.” But at the same time 41 percent of those same companies don’t allow those employees to access e-mail or the company network on those machines, either at the office or from home. As analyst David Johnson writes, that just encourages people to spend their own time figuring out how to bypass these rules:

That leaves a lot of employees to find their own ways to get around corporate prohibition. Companies Forrester spoke with for this document described a gray market emerging internally, where employees share tips and strategies to use their Macs at work and bypass corporate roadblocks.

Forrester says you may as well let Mac users have them out in the open and accessible to the network at work since their study shows that people who want to work on MacBooks, for instance, classify as a “power notebook user.” To them that means those employees are the ones that work longer and are more productive. Another reason for the change of heart: Forrester says Macs “have developed a reputation for reliability and low maintenance.” What IT person in charge of the budget doesn’t want to hear that?

But while the guys managing desktop and laptop deployment may still need to get with the program, the teams managing mobile IT have already seen the light on letting employees have input on their devices. Since the arrival of the iPhone and Android smartphones, this same phenomenon has been taking place. A group of mobile IT specialists talked about it at GigaOM Mobilize in San Francisco last month.

Julie Palen, SVP of Tangoe, says that a great percentage of employees are not asking their employers for a corporate phone. They don’t mind paying for a device or the plan as long as they can use a device of their choice and access the company network, she said.

“It’s irrelevant who owns the device or who pays for the plan,” said Palen. “It’s all about the device, as long as the data is secure and controlled … then that’s the big change and the answer becomes yes.”

Because the tools are there to secure those networks, companies are basically silly not to let tech-savvy employees use their own devices. And mobile IT guys finally figured it out this year, the Mobilize panel agreed:

“2011 was the year mobile IT was born,” said Bob Tinker, CEO of MobileIron. “It was the year the IT industry figured out mobile, and it’s the year that mobile figured out IT … Every small, medium and large enterprise around the world is going to be deploying smartphones and tablets at scale over the next 12 to 18 months.”

It’ll be interesting to see what kind of effect Forrester’s exhortation has over the next year or so. Will IT managers take it to heart, or just continue business as usual? We can guess which option employees would want.

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RIM’s pain could be Apple’s enterprise gain

Darrell Etherington — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:54:11 +0000

A new survey of business professionals out of the U.K. reveals that RIM’s recent network problems could work out very well for enterprise adoption of Apple’s iPhone. A survey of 500 professionals in various industries conducted by office space locator Officebroker.com revealed a lot of individuals interested in jumping ship and Apple’s platform as the life raft of choice.

Forty percent of respondents indicated a desire to take flight from the beleaguered RIM, which recently unveiled its next-generation BBX (the name of which itself is under fire) platform for smartphone devices. Of that group, 64 percent said the iPhone was the device they’d switch to. Just under a quarter indicated they’d consider switching to Android, and a distant 5 percent said a Windows Mobile handset would be their next phone of choice.

That’s no surprise, since iPhones, along with iPads, are still far and away the preferred mobile devices in terms of new enterprise activations, as a recent report affirms. The media attention and early sales success of the iPhone 4S probably also have a lot to do with Apple’s mobile devices being at the fore of consumer minds, and the addition of iMessage in iOS 5 provides a handy BBM replacement for RIM fans to slide into.

RIM is also facing a huge transition that will be a challenge for the company as it adopts BBX. BBX will require new apps (it’s QNX-based, like the PlayBook OS) and users of current-gen BB OS 7 devices likely won’t be able to upgrade. While RIM makes the jump from its old platform to the new, Apple will have a good opportunity to win over even more enterprise users to the iPhone and to iOS.

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Dutch Senate goes digital thanks to iPads

Darrell Etherington — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:33:37 +0000

The Dutch Senate is going paperless, and the iPad is going to get them there. The upper house of parliament for the Netherlands was told two weeks ago it would only have paper to rely on for one more week, after which point, the iPad and a special Senate-specific app would replace documents and printouts (via Reuters).

Dutch Senators are the first in Europe to try such an ambitious project, and two weeks into the experiment, reported being mostly “delighted” with how it’s progressing so far. Some document printing is still permitted, but by and large, reference information, calendars, proposed legislation, correspondence and meeting notes are handled through the special Senate app on iPads.

While the program, including the app development and iPad purchases, cost €150,000 (around $204,150 USD), Dutch Senate Secretary General Geert Jan Hamilton told Reuters it would save the Senate around €140,000 in paper printing costs during the first year alone. After that, upkeep for the program will only be around €35,000 per year, so the Senate will quickly be able to recoup their initial investment and save plenty besides.

The program by the Dutch Senate is only the latest example of a growing push to replace paper workflows and supporting documents with digital equivalents via the iPad. Airlines are also testing similar programs, as are local municipal governments in the U.S., and medical professionals. The iPad’s disruptive effective in government, education and business may eventually become its most financially advantage outcome for Apple. Though it will take longer to materialize than the iPad’s consumer success, since large organizations move at a slower pace than the average gadget-buyer, we could eventually see the iPad become for business what the Dell PC tower once was.

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Is ‘cool’ Apple’s key to the future of enterprise?

Darrell Etherington — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:01:02 +0000

Apple is making inroads among enterprise customers like never before, thanks in large part to the success of its mobile devices. Those devices, combined with the cool factor surrounding Apple devices, could be the key to future adoption of all Apple products by business, Macs included, according to a growing number of experts.

Zdnet ‘s Larry Dignan spoke to Bausch + Lomb CIO Alan Farnsworth in an interview published Friday, and Farnsworth said that part of Apple’s strength in enterprise applications is the ability of its devices to maintain the interest of employees who otherwise might not pay much attention to IT initiatives. Bausch + Lomb was early to adopt the iPad, and now has 1,700 Apple tablets deployed. The company uses iPad 2s for employees who deal with customers regularly, and shifts older models to other workers, including some on the manufacturing floor, according to the Zdnet report.

Farnsworth also said that Mac support is on the way, in an effort by IT to meet employees where they’re already comfortable:

If you let people communicate at work like they do at home they will be more productive. We had iPhones before iPads and we ramped up with Apple once we started using the iPad. Now we have Mac pilots underway.

Ingenix CIO Art Glasgow also believes that cool is more of a factor than some might think when it comes to enterprise deployment. A couple of months ago, Glasgow told ReadWriteWeb that the iPad has the double threat of being both cool and useful:

Cool matters and usability rules the day so devices like the iPad have to be not just accounted for, but designed for. The good news is that devices like the iPad aren’t just cool. They are flexible, multifunction tools that are changing the way we work and create and in that sense may very well be not just an innovation themselves, but a catalyst to innovations.

You could argue that the value of Apple’s coolness factor is more of a secondary consideration when it comes to its enterprise success, but I think there’s actually plenty of evidence to the contrary. Dell executive Andy Lark, for instance, pointed out a number of fairly good reasons why the iPad isn’t practical in the enterprise, and there are no shortage of articles with sound arguments against the adoption of Apple products by IT departments.

Apple faces a lot of technical challenges in convincing companies to deploy its products, but they’re adopting them anyway, with 91 percent of Fortune 500 companies testing or deploying iPhones as of July. That’s because Apple’s biggest strength for enterprise users lies in the cachet that comes with the Apple brand. Enterprise users are consumers, too, so both internal and external clients at any corporation are, by and large, going to be drawn to Apple products, which can streamline the adoption of new tech initiatives among employees and help sell to customers.

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Apple Store set to open right in RIM’s backyard

Darrell Etherington — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:46:16 +0000

Apple is preparing to open five new retail stores internationally on Saturday, including one smack dab in the middle of competitor Research In Motion’s home territory of Waterloo, Ontario. Apple continues to grow its physical retail presence, which it has cited as a major contributor to the success of devices like the iPad.

The new Waterloo location (at the Conestoga Mall) seems significant, considering that the city’s biggest claim to fame is being the home of RIM, maker of the BlackBerry smartphones and software. Apple’s other stores in Canada to date have generally been located either in major urban centers, or in communities bordering such metropolitan areas. Waterloo, a university town with a reputation for being Canada’s Silicon Valley, thanks in large part to RIM’s presence there, still only has a population of 98,000, swelling to around 120,000 during the post-secondary school year. Apple’s first Canadian store to venture outside of the major cities and their suburbs certainly comes with a provocative address.

Apple’s other new stores opening this Saturday include two in the U.S., and two abroad. Here’s the rest of list:

Fashion Place, Murray, Utah
Anchorage 5th Avenue Mall, Anchorage, Alaska
Southland, Cheltenham, Victoria, Australia
I Gigli, Florence, Italy

Apple’s planned retail expansion in 2011 includes a lot of international growth, and this crop of openings definitely reflects that. Any readers planning to pay a visit to any of these locations during their inaugural weekends?

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iPad’s enterprise growth bested only by iPhone

Darrell Etherington — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 14:27:15 +0000

The iPad is leading the tablet charge in small and medium-sized businesses (SMB), resulting in a growth spurt that puts the Apple device out in front of nearly all other comers when it comes to new ActiveSync activations performed by enterprise cloud services provider Intermedia. I say nearly because there’s still one device that sees even more activations: the iPhone.

Source: Intermedia. Click the image for more.

Intermedia handles around 350,000 premium hosted Microsoft Exchange servers, making it the largest such email provider operating worldwide. It surveys the device makeup of its customers’ ActiveSync-capable smartphones and tablets (basically any device that isn’t a BlackBerry) in the process of running said servers, gathering the data in cloud mobility reports.

This time around, for the period between the end of May and August, iPad activation rose a considerable 102 percent compared to the period immediately preceding it, making it the number two most-activated device (including smartphones) that Intermedia supports. The breakdown of total activations for the period saw the iPhone at number one with 51 percent overall, followed by the iPad with 21 percent. Rounding out the top five were Motorola devices with 9 percent, HTC handsets with 8 percent, and finally LG, Nokia, Palm and Samsung devices with a combined total of less than 4 percent.

Apple’s success with SMB customers can likely be accounted for somewhat by the greater willingness of smaller enterprise customers to embrace “bring your own device” models of IT hardware support, but it’s a trend that seems to apply equally among enterprises of all sizes.

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