I have been holding on publishing these reflections since Apple and IBM announced their strange partnership a few weeks ago. Part of the hesitation was simply waiting until the markets settle down a bit after the overreaction caused by the strategic alliance between the two mobile power houses.

Despite the high speculations in the markets that caused severe stocks movements in companies like BlackBerry and MobileIron, we believe is really hard to predict whether this partnership has any tangible relevance in the enterprise mobile markets. While the idea of Apple and IBM working together is certainly intriguing, the details revealed about the focus areas of the partnership seems largely irrelevant. From all the reactions in the market, I think my favorite’s came from the new CEO of BlackBerry John Chen when he referred to the Apple-IBM relationship as “two elephants dancing”.

The Partnership

If we review the details of the partnership, it’s very clear that we can identify four key areas of focus:

• A new class of more than 100 industry-specific enterprise solutions including native apps, developed exclusively from the ground up, for iPhone and iPad;
• Unique IBM cloud services optimized for iOS, including device management, security, analytics and mobile integration;
• New AppleCare® service and support offering tailored to the needs of the enterprise; and
• New packaged offerings from IBM for device activation, supply and management.

Additionally, as part of the agreement, IBM will sell IPhone and IPads provisioned with industry specific solutions to some of its business clients.

While conceptually the areas of focus could be very relevant in the enterprise mobile market, is hard to determine if an Apple-IBM strategic alliance would be the right execution model to tackle these challenges. After all, part of the beauty and success of the App Store have been based on the diversity of offerings coming from developers and business all over the world. Until now, IBM Mobile First strategy have proven to be largely infective competing in a fast changing and innovative enterprise mobile market with emerging platforms such as Appcelerator, FeedHenry or KidoZen.

What does the Partnership Means….

For Apple…

From an Apple’s perspective, the partnership with IBM will offer a series of specific solutions that could add more credibility to its enterprise offerings. Considering the high levels of customizations required by mobile business apps, the access to IBM Global Services can be an attractive factor to enterprise with deep pockets.

From our perspective, we don’t think Apple needs IBM to be relevant in the enterprise game. A multi-vendor value proposition including companies like Accenture or Infosys as well as major mobile business apps providers such as Click Software might have been more effective and less risky from a customer standpoint.

For IBM…

At a high level, it’s really hard to see how this partnership is really relevant to IBM. From a customer acquisition perspective, the partnership with Apple doesn’t seem to add any value to IBM’s Mobile First value proposition beyond the instant credibility. Quite the contrary, the entire value proposition seems to be targeted to prototypical IBM customers on which “big blue” is already relevant. The only exception to that rule might be the commercialization of IBM mobile-first services as part of an Apple offering but it’s also very early to tell how well received that offer will be considering the lack of quality in the current IBM Mobile First offerings.

For EMM Vendors…

While the Apple-IBM partnership might be seen as largely irrelevant from both an Apple and IBM perspective, it has certainly had an impact in the enterprise mobile management (EMM) market. Today vendors like Airwatch, BlackBerry or MobileIron offer a series of mobile business applications such as email, document management, etc as part of their EMM offerings. Considering that IBM offers the MaaS360 solution as part of their Mobile First offering, we can expect EMM vendors to be challenged in terms of their business apps capabilities when competing with IBM. From a market perspective, shares of EMM platform vendors such as BlackBerry and MobileIron took a beating after the Apple-IBM announcement.

For the Enterprise Mobility Market…

Beyond the initial press hype, it’s hard to see how the Apple-IBM announcement is going to be influential or transformational in the enterprise mobile market. Until now, IBM’s Worklight offering results incredibly limiting to most customers trying to enable enterprise mobile solutions and the quality of the stack is questionable at best. With vendors innovating in every single area of the enterprise mobile ecosystem, it’s really hard to think that Apple and IBM (mostly IBM) are going to be able to keep up with the rapidly changing market demands and competition in order to maintain the relevance of their offering.