Roger Fingas
Apple's latest attempt at boosting its enterprise credentials is reportedly a new hire, Karen Appleton, formerly a long-time executive with cloud storage and collaboration service Box.
Appleton announced her departure from Box last week via Medium, but only confirmed her new employer in a Monday Facebook post, according to Re/code. Sources told the site about the enterprise connection, but couldn't offer any further details on Appleton's role.
She did, however, join Box in 2007 as just its eighth hire, becoming the company's senior VP for industries. She also spearheaded Box.org, which made the company's services available to non-profits for free or at low cost.
Traditionally Apple has treated enterprise as a secondary concern, preferring to target the general public. The company has increasingly cozied up to enterprise customers since 2014, when it first began partnering with IBM on iOS apps. In January 2015 it picked up a senior VP from HP, John Solomon, who was reportedly made a lynchpin in improving enterprise sales.
Apple's position in the enterprise world has been helped by "bring your own device" policies at many employers, letting workers choose Apple devices such as iPhones where a platform-exclusive app or service isn't essential. Some organizations will, of course, mandate Apple devices for various reasons.
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18 Comments
Beautiful woman. Yes, noticing beauty is not sexist btw. Like how noticing someone is black is not racist. Brings to mind that annoying video on YouTube "I am not black", yes you are and clearly you've a problem with that fact.
Enterprise is important for Apple, but I'd like them to really focus hard on iCloud reliability and Siri power and accuracy. Dictation on iPhone has often over past 5 weeks been unavailable for me without mention of this on Apple's status page. Somewhere in the black box is an answer.
She beat out the guy from junk.com
Apple seems to have a good relationship with Box. I wonder if buying them will bring any benefit?
If you are going to tout Apple's moves into the enterprise, probably should mention the partnership with Cisco.