IBM And Apple Enter The Enterprise Mobility Market

Enterprise mobility is going to see some drastic changes pretty soon. IBM and Apple’s EMM deal will hasten the iOS’s entry into the EMM market. IBM will now begin selling iPad’s and iPhone’s to their existing enterprise customer base. Further, they will also create iOS services and apps and launch many more solutions which will also include mobile device management.

Cloud hosted Mobile Device Management or MDM is being played out as major competition to BlackBerry. The entire market is taking IBM on their word and treating MDM as the prime competitor to BlackBerry. A certain amount of rumors have been going around regarding this deal, most of them untrue and completely baseless. This new deal from IBM is indeed forceful competition to anybody in the current MDM market.

The whole IBM-Apple deal is confusing to be fair. Fiberlink, which is an existing player in the present MDM market, is owned by IBM. This puts in question claims of exclusivity of the IBM & Apple deal. Proper clarifications need to be provided regarding this. Is IBM in fact, planning to completely drop support for other hardware players in the market? Most likely that Apple has given the exclusive enterprise sales rights to IBM. This would also be a smart move, as IBM is doing almost all of the actual lifting. IBM is on the path to creating brand new services and applications to suit the iOS devices they are proposing to bring out. IBM also stands to make a fair amount of margin profit from device sales. They are after all selling Apple devices.

So how do these developments affect BlackBerry’s future? BlackBerry is the market leader in the current MDM market space. This deal won’t bring about any drastic changes in the market anytime soon. However, this announcement might just be the beginning more serious developments. Other players might now be seriously considering entering the MDM market. The entry of these tech giants into this marketplace is an indicator of the possibility of other big players to make their way here. Pretty soon we might even see big companies like Microsoft and Google entering this sphere.

Just a few months back, BlackBerry was up for sale. There wasn’t much of an interest from anyone at that time. Now all of a sudden, everyone’s interest towards the MDM market has spiked up. And this is the place where BlackBerry is now holding the number one position. All the companies that showed negligible interest in BlackBerry previously might be the ones who stand to benefit from some form of a partnership with BlackBerry. Such a partnering would at the very least, ensure that the process of entering the MDM markets is swift and smooth. With the race heating up briskly in the MDM marketplace, it would be highly beneficial for BlackBerry.

As to the ‘when’ of this we can only speculate. However, logical thinking leads us to the conclusion that, any new player entering the market at this ripe stage would need to have the aid and support of established market leaders. Building the excellent rapport that BlackBerry has built with their customers so far is certainly not an easy task.