Enterprise

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IBM’s new Garage initiative aims to accelerate development of iOS enterprise apps

Building upon the Apple-IBM enterprise mobility partnership established three years ago, Big Blue (that's a nickname for IBM) today announced a new initiative to help accelerate the development of MobileFirst enterprise apps for iPhone and iPad.

Upcoming app development studios, called Garages, will soon go online in Shanghai, China and Bucharest, Romania, in addition to IBM's existing MobileFirst for iOS studio in Bangalore, India.

IBM's other app studios and Garages can be found in US cities Atlanta, Cupertino, Toronto and Chicago. Plus, the company has committed to establishing new app studios in Shanghai, China and Bucharest, Romania. Lastly, mobile enterprise apps designed by IBM can now be embedded with the cognitive capabilities of its Watson cognitive system.

Bridget van Kralingen, Senior Vice President, IBM Industry Platforms, said:

Four years ago, we made enterprise mobility a reality, and we’ve seen how transformative mobile can be. Today, companies are now reigning in mobile faster than ever, creating a critical need for powerful innovations that will reinvent how they do business. We’re combining the power of mobile with cognitive and analytics to continue to push the market forward.

IBM has officially named some of the clients adopting iOS enterprise apps for their own employees, such as Lufthansa Group, City Furniture, Singapore Airlines and Japan Airlines.

Since its introduction three years ago, the partnership between Apple and IBM has resulted in several billion dollars in signings with more than 3,800 client engagements supported by market-ready and custom iOS apps designed for professions across all industries, including store associates, flight attendants and field technicians.

SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS now available to developers

Apple said yesterday that a software-development kit (SDK) for SAP Cloud Platform development is now available to iOS developers. Announced in May 2016, the Apple-SAP partnership aims to help reinvent business processes and workflows. The SDK lets developers build native iOS apps in Swift, Apple’s modern programming language, and integrate them with SAP's Cloud Platform.

For the uninitiated, SAP is a German business software maker that writes enterprise software for managing business operations and customer relations.

Apple-SAP partnership to bring first enterprise app in March

The very first enterprise app born out of Apple's partnership with German business software solutions maker SAP will arrive by the end of March, or about a full year after the Apple-SAP deal was announced. SAP said at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain this morning that the official Cloud Platform software development kit for iOS will hit March 30 to help developers write business apps based on SAP's Cloud Platform and Swift, Apple’s modern programming language.

Apple’s Vice President of corporate and government sales has stepped down

John Solomon, Apple's Vice President for Enterprise and Government, has stepped down. He led sales teams charged with pushing Apple hardware and software to big companies and government agencies with large technology budgets.

Apple confirmed his departure to Reuters, but refused to comment further. Solomon wouldn't reveal why he left Apple either. It's unclear if losing a key executive for business sales might slow Apple's efforts to push its solutions to large businesses in recent years.

10.5-inch iPad Pro rumored to target education and enterprise markets

Apple may position its rumored new 10.5-inch iPad Pro model as the go-to tablet in the education and enterprise markets, if a report Tuesday in DigiTimes is anything to go by. The Taiwanese trade publication learned from Asian supply chain makers that the Cupertino firm's decided to add a new screen size to the lineup because existing 9.7-inch models proved too small and the 12.9-inch iPad Pro too expensive for business users and students.