Apple’s explosive first-quarter results included deeper penetration into large corporations with not only the iPhone and iPad but also Mac PCs.
Saying that “iPhone is changing the way companies across the globe use mobile devices for work,” Apple senior VP and CFO Peter Oppenheimer also revealed during yesterday’s earnings call with analysts that “many” Fortune 500 companies “are developing and deploying mission-critical iPhone apps to help improve productivity and give employees secure and immediate access to information anywhere.”
In addition, the iPad “continues its unprecedented adoption in business,” Oppenheimer reported, adding that Apple is seeing this phenomenon across a wide swath of industries that I’ll mention in a minute.
But I was struck by a related comment made later in the call by Apple CEO Tim Cook as he described how some large corporations are parlaying their positive experiences with the iPhone and iPad into purchases of Mac PCs as well.
“In the enterprise space, as an example, we've seen iPhones sort of be a catalyst, and the iPads moves after the iPhone,” Cook said.
“In several accounts, we've seen the Mac follow the iPhone. And so there are clear examples where one product has pulled the other in. At a macro level, how much it's happening is very difficult to put our fingers on, but many customers—consumers, consumers, enterprise, education—they’re all pointing that out.”
Cook also added this perspective on iPad’s success in the enterprise, according to the earnings-call transcript prepared by Morningstar:
But the thing that is very different about the iPad is you can see it beginning to appear virtually everywhere. The enterprise has adopted it in a very large percent of the Fortune 500, as Peter talked about earlier. That number is also quite large when you look at the Global 500. In education in K-12, we sold twice the number of iPads as we did Mac. Generally speaking, education adopts new technologies fairly slowly, so that's somewhat surprising.
And here are some additional revealing comments on Apple’s progress in the enterprise from Oppenheimer:
Many companies around the world have thousands of employees using iPhone and business apps. Some new examples include, Royal Dutch Shell, Credit Suisse, Kimberly-Clark, St. Jude Medical, Covidien. Teradata, Nike, Danske Bank and Facebook…
iPad continues its unprecedented adoption in business. Nearly all the top companies, within major Fortune 500 markets, including pharma, manufacturing, hospitality, consumer products, financial services, healthcare and retail are actively using iPad to improve workflows, business processes and customer engagement. We are delighted to learn how iPad enables businesses to change the way they work.
Real estate agents like Caldwell Banker and Sotheby's access sales presentation and use custom iPad apps in the field. Retail chains such as Bed, Bath & Beyond use iPads to deliver key business metrics on the sales forum. Wineries are using iPads in their vineyards to the call up weather data and soil profiles, record quality assessment and make decisions on the spot about whether to harvest their grapes. In this past quarter, Chinese airline EVA has also deployed iPad for pilots and crew for flight manuals, documentation and training.
(Follow me on Twitter at bobevansSAP.)
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