Apple distributor sees increased interest in the iPad among businesses
Ingram Micro CEO Greg Spierkl told Reuters in an interview that Apple in the past has preferred to sell the iPad to retailers, but has recently become more amenable to selling it to businesses as well.
"What it's telling us is that there's a (business to business) opportunity starting to develop for these devices, which is not necessarily where they were targeted initially," said Spierkel, who went on to cite sales representatives in the field as one "significant use" of tablets by businesses.
Apple has increasingly relied on Ingram Micro and other distributors to market its products to businesses, reportedly going so far as to lay off 50 of its enterprise salespeople in March of last year.
In the most recent quarter, Apple sold a record 4.19 million iPads, but Wall Street analysts expressed disappointment over the figure.
During the company's Q4 2010 conference call, Apple CEO Steve Jobs highlighted enterprise sales of the iPad as a growth opportunity for the company.
"We haven't pushed it [the iPad] real hard in business, and it's being grabbed out of our hands," Jobs said.
"We've got a tiger by the tail here, and this is a new model of computing which we've already got tens of millions of people trained on with the iPhone, and that lends itself to lots of different aspects of life, both personal and business," he said.
According to Apple executives, over 65 percent of the Fortune 100 are already deploying or trying the iPad, including Procter & Gamble, Lowes, NBC Universal and Hyatt.
Earlier this week, Bloomberg published a report saying that Apple had contracted with Unisys Corp to sell its products to corporations and government agencies. Unisys will "provide maintenance and other services to companies and government agencies that purchase Apple devices," the report said.
Gene Zapfel, a managing partner at Unisys, said the deal was a first for Apple. âMost of those organizations are still pretty heavily [Windows] PC-based,â Zapfel said. âApple is going to crack the nut and clients are going to start buying a lot more.â
Wells Fargo and Mercedes-Benz were some of the first companies to try out the iPad for business purposes. A June survey by Citrix found that 80 percent of its business users planned to buy an iPad.
10 Comments
I know a number of CEOs who are extremely interested in having their staff use iPad's, but none of them will commit until they are more practical to use.
Attachments in mail cannot be saved to Dropbox, file transfer cannot be performed with a flash drive. Until Apple build in the ability to move files as needed, certainly between applications, and stop this silly restriction of 'you must physically connect to iTunes' to manipulate your data, they are cutting off their nose to spite their face in terms of business acceptance.
Another barrier is printing, and although addressed to some extent already with apps and the soon to appear Air Print, it will take time to be overcome.
I know a number of CEOs who are extremely interested in having their staff use iPad's, but none of them will commit until they are more practical to use.
Attachments in mail cannot be saved to Dropbox, file transfer cannot be performed with a flash drive. Until Apple build in the ability to move files as needed, certainly between applications, and stop this silly restriction of 'you must physically connect to iTunes' to manipulate your data, they are cutting off their nose to spite their face in terms of business acceptance.
Another barrier is printing, and although addressed to some extent already with apps and the soon to appear Air Print, it will take time to be overcome.
You make good points. With a renewed focus on going after enterprise / business customers, I'm willing to bet the next iOS presention in March when they introduce "iOS 5" will be heavily geared towards enterprise / business features.
I know a number of CEOs who are extremely interested in having their staff use iPad's, but none of them will commit until they are more practical to use.
Attachments in mail cannot be saved to Dropbox, file transfer cannot be performed with a flash drive. Until Apple build in the ability to move files as needed, certainly between applications, and stop this silly restriction of 'you must physically connect to iTunes' to manipulate your data, they are cutting off their nose to spite their face in terms of business acceptance.
Another barrier is printing, and although addressed to some extent already with apps and the soon to appear Air Print, it will take time to be overcome.
Agreed. It's good that you don't have to wrestle with an overly complex file system but they need to develop a way to share documents between applications in a simple and intuitive way. And wifi syncing that occurs as soon as you walk into your house is something I'm surprised we don't already have.
Most of those questions can be answered by someone who's writing apps.
Most of those questions can be answered by someone who's writing apps.
Ideally, it should be a core part of the OS, not an app.