10 Important Facts to Know About the IBM-Apple Alliance

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10 Important Facts to Know About the IBM-Apple Alliance

IBM will most likely make those devices available via its business partners, as well as its direct sales force. The devices will come loaded with applications the two companies develop.

The deal presents a new service and support opportunity for IBM partners, who, by extension, will get to resell Apple service.

The goal is to build applications that run natively on Apple platforms. The two programming languages used to develop these apps are Objective-C and Swift.

Currently, most Apple mobile devices are primarily used to consume content, but future devices will be used to create it as well. The line between tablets and PCs gets blurrier by the day.

The value of IBM’s $2 billion Softlayer acquisition increases substantially. IBM envisions using Bluemix running on IBM SoftLayer as a backend-as-a-service (BaaS) platform that exposes RESTful APIs.

IBM acquired Worklight to build mobile applications in 2012. The battle with Oracle and SAP for control of emerging enterprise mobile platforms will intensify.

Mobile is now a distribution channel for analytics. The goal is to embed access to big data analytics inside mobile apps.

Partners will see emergence of APIs to invoke governance and security services exposed via IBM Bluemix cloud. By leveraging IBM CloudMix, the two companies will secure iOS in the enterprise

One would presume this integration is inevitable—that IBM Watson speech recognition chats up Siri on Apple devices.

Most enterprise apps operate in batch mode. Mobile applications generally require a real-time response from enterprise apps.