Apple Q3 earnings reveal its quiet enterprise ambitions

There were a few moments there where it felt like we were all tuning into a quarterly earnings call from BlackBerry, not Apple.

Amid the discussion of better-than-expected sales numbers of its iPhones and iPad devices on Tuesday night, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer went to surprisingly great lengths to talk about the company’s increasing acceptance in the enterprise. He noted that, according to market research firm IDC, Apple’s share of the business segment is now greater than 60 per cent. He also rattled off a slew of marquee customer names such as American Airlines, Cisco, Roche and SAP, which have each deployed tens of thousands of its smartphones and tablets.

This is the kind of thing BlackBerry, in its heyday as a corporate darling, would do all the time, but it had always been an anathema to Apple, which publicly shrugged off the idea of being used by CEOs and VPs in favour of hip consumers.

Even Apple CEO Tim Cook referenced Apple’s traction as a business technology provider during the earning call’s Q&A, suggesting that all-out domination was not out of the question.

“I think we’re at the very front end of that, so we have lots of growth opportunity,” he said. “I don’t subscribe to the common view that the higher end, if you will, of the smart phone market, has hit its peak.”

The difference between Apple and BlackBerry is that, while the latter is scrambling to hold onto some existing enterprise users, Apple has gained them almost by accident. It may not have single-handedly triggered the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend, but the popularity of its products have been a key catalyst.

Given its growth has slowed considerably in the past year, and with no breakthrough products expected until 2014, the natural next step would be for Apple to build upon its foundation with corporate customers as a sort of interim sales strategy. There are signs this is exactly what’s happening. The next version of its mobile operating system, iOS, comes with a bevy of business-friendly features. These include the ability for IT departments to limit which apps and accounts can open documents and which apps can connect to a company’s virtual private network, as well as improved security for third-party apps.

Apple has yet to formally declare itself as a competitor in the emerging mobile device management (MDM) space, like BlackBerry has, perhaps because it could threaten its proprietary business model. As Analysys Mason Research Analyst Patrick Rusby observed in a recent research note, content and application management are only two pieces of the MDM puzzle for enterprise IT departments.

“They need to be ready to manage and support a large range of devices,” he says, and while BlackBerry is trying to reposition itself as device-agnostic, Apple can’t afford to encourage anyone to adopt anything other than an iPhone or iPad.

Instead, Apple has to somehow convince companies that they should not only accept the influx of its devices into their offices, but to embrace them as the new corporate standard. At this point in their respective histories, who would have thought Apple might have a tougher marketing challenge than BlackBerry?