How Tim Cook created a $25 billion beast of a business in 2015 in a market where Apple used to struggle
Apple's sales to enterprise markets "accounted for about $25 billion in annual Apple revenue in the last 12 months, up 40% over the prior year," Tim Cook said in October. And he thinks its enterprise sales will grow a lot in the future.
That $25 billion makes Apple one of the 15 largest enterprise tech firms, ZDNet's Robin Harris calculates.
Source: ZDNet.
"To put that $25 billion in perspective, that is larger than the sales of EMC," Harris writes. Dell is trying to buy ECM for $65 billion and EMC earned $24.4 billion in 2014.
Source: Google Finance.
A company named Jamf, which makes its living selling software to help IT departments support fleets of Macs and iOS devices, compiled a list of stats on Apple's 2015 growth, too.
Stats are based on a survey of 500 IT pros, nearly all of them (over 90%) supporting both Macs and Windows PCs for employees. Source: Jamf
Enterprise usage of Macs grew 68%, usage of iPhones grew 46%, and iPads grew 36% at 500 companies Jamf surveyed.
Source: Jamf.
More and more employees are asking for a Mac instead of a Windows PC. Two-thirds of IT pros thought that Macs will cut into Windows market share at their companies in the next 3 years, Jamf found.
Source: Jamf.
The No. 1 reason why enterprises buy their employees Macs and iPhones (or let them bring their own to the office) is because users are asking for them.
Source: Jamf.
75% of IT pros Jamf surveyed say Macs are more secure than other PCs. 64% say Macs are easier to manage.
Source: Jamf.
For instance, as part of its partnership with Apple, in 2015, IBM started buying Macs for its employees. IBM agreed to buy 50,000 MacBooks by the end of 2015.
As of October, IBM had issued 30,000 MacBooks to employees, and was adding 1,900 new MacBooks every week.
IBM is saving $270 for every Mac it uses instead of a Windows PC, says Apple CFO Luca Maestri.
IBM is saving money on IT support costs, it says. Only 5% of employees using MacBooks called the IT help desk, versus 40% of PC users, IBM VP Fletcher Previn said.
Source: Jamf.
The IT pros Jamf surveyed also say that iOS devices are more secure (82%) easier to manage (78%) compared to other mobile devices.
Source: Jamf.
United Airlines is another case in point. It bought 23,000 iPhone 6 Plus devices in December, 2014, for flight attendants and another 6,000 of them in December, 2015, for its customer service reps. United previously bought 11,000 iPads for pilots.
Apple has even bigger plans to infiltrate the workplace. For instance, in August it announced a huge new partnership with computer network giant Cisco. The two companies will make Apple iOS devices work extra-specially well on Cisco enterprise networks.
But there's more. Cisco will also be selling IOS devices to its huge roster of enterprise customers, just as IBM is selling it to its customers. Both Cisco and IBM have huge enterprise sales forces. Apple doesn't, so it picked partners to help it there, Cook said in October.
Source: Tim Cook quarterly analysts call.
Plus, just a few weeks ago, Apple (with help from IBM) made its new app development language, Swift, free and open source. Swift added technology to attract enterprise programmers (people who write custom apps for their own companies). This should bring more enterprises into Apple's waiting arms.
Apple's push in the enterprise worked in 2015, and will likely grow in 2016. In a survey of 1,369 IT pros conducted by ZDNet, 84 percent said their companies have begun buying Apple devices for employees.
Source: Tech Pro Research.
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