Look How Hard Apple Is Working To Lure Business Users

Over the past two years, Apple has seriously loaded its iPhone/iPad software with features for a powerful group of customers: the enterprises that buy fleets of devices for their employees.

These two pictures really illustrate the work.

Here's the list of enterprise features in iOS that Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, showed during the keynote Monday at the company's 2014 developers conference:

Compare that with this list of enterprise features that Apple showed off at the 2013 developers conference, just one year ago.

(We've got a rundown of the new enterprise iOS 8 features here. And here's the list of the ones in iOS 7.)

Apple doesn't have a choice. Its big rival Samsung is also out pursing big contracts with enterprises with a program it calls "Samsung For Enterprises" (SAFE).

We expect this emphasis on the enterprise to grow stronger at Apple. At the start of this year, Apple was looking to hire about 115 people with enterprise expertise.

Plus, CEO Tim Cook has been proudly pointing out how Apple has been winning big corporate contracts. He's fond of quoting this statistic, as he told Wall Street analysts in January:

The iPhone is used in 97% of the Fortune 500, and 91% of the Global 500, and iPad is used in 98% of the Fortune 500 and 93% of the Global 500.