Apple Partners With Cisco To Boost Enterprise Business

An anonymous reader writes: Apple and Cisco announced a partnership aimed at helping Apple's devices work better for businesses. Cisco will provide services specially optimized for iOS devices across mobile, cloud, and on premises-based collaboration tools such as Cisco Spark, Cisco Telepresence and Cisco WebEx, the companies said in a statement. "What makes this new partnership unique is that our engineering teams are innovating together to build joint solutions that our sales teams and partners will take jointly to our customers," Cisco Chief Executive Chuck Robbins said in a blog post.

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[Greyfox]

Apple partners with Crisco to make a delicious pie!

Not surprising

[phayes]

Cisco Engineers massively prefer Macs over PCs to the point that those that use anything other than Macs are rare. By improving their products on Macs, they are helping their employees even before any clients are considered.

Re:Not surprising

[bobthesungeek76036]

Sun Microsystems was that way too. Everyone had Macs (except for sales force). Then when we went to the Big-O, we all had to install the corporate XP image on VBox (or Fusion) to do our work...

Hey Apple if you want enterprise business

[Sycraft-fu]

How about, well, learning to support an enterprise? Stop treating every device like it is a consumer toy. Offer some real management tools, don't require an Apple account to do everything on your computers, etc, etc, etc.

It always amuses me when I see Apple talk about the enterprise space because they have done such a shit job supporting OS-X for the enterprise for so long. You can make it work, of course, and there are plenty of 3rd party tools, many very expensive, to help but it is all your own doing. Apple themselves seem to view each device as an island, property of a single consumer to be used as a toy and thrown away when the next shiny toy comes along.

Of course what they really mean here is "We want big businesses to buy our stuff, but we don't want to actually go through the trouble of supporting them."

Re:Hey Apple if you want enterprise business

[nine-times]

Offer some real management tools, don't require an Apple account to do everything on your computers, etc, etc, etc.

Or honestly, you know, just... fix the broken crap. Take all the stuff that Apple does offer for business, and fix the bugs.

Like take care of the bugs in Mail that cause it to not sync properly when mailboxes hit a certain size. Fix the bugs with Open Directory, Profile Manager, and mobile user account syncing. Speed up access to file servers, and fix the SMB problems that cause files to become locked and Finder to crash. Some of these problems have existed for years, and they're just not getting fixed.

If they can lock that down, here are some more things they can do: Start supporting server hardware again. If they don't want to make their own server hardware, just provide some licensing route to allow you to run OSX server on ESXi or HyperV on non-Apple servers. Throw some money into OSX server development. Either forget about providing email/calendar/contact/chat, or invest enough in it to make it competitive with Exchange and Google Apps. Integrate something like Munki or Casper to provide configuration management and updates for 3rd party applications.

They're want to partner with Cisco...? Fine. Partner with the Meraki division, and make co-branded Cisco/Meraki/Apple networking equipment. Create an integrated cloud management platform that manages routers, wireless access points, switches, servers, NAS devices, virtual machines, MDM, and really the whole network to be controlled from an single-pane-of-glass. Have Apple assist in the hardware and UI design, and integrate it with the now-fixed Profile Manager, Open Directory, and Munki functionality that's been added to OSX server. Then have it support Windows, too.

But of course, they're not going to do any of that. They won't do anything as mundane as fixing the bugs in the SMB support, and they won't do anything as ambitious as trying to make Mac OSX Server competitive with Windows or pushing cloud management forward. Instead, they're going to continue making incremental upgrades to their consumer-centric features while striking buzzword-friendly deals with Cisco and IBM to provide the illusion that they care about the Enterprise.

iOS or IOS?

[asimons04]

What OS are the routers going to run? iOS or IOS?

Re:iOS or IOS?

[cosm]

+5 Experience. How much you wanna bet the userbase today doesn't even get the joke.

Re:iOS or IOS?

[seoras]

I worked on IOS for 12 years and iOS for the last 3 years.
Head hunters love me. T
They skim my Linkedin profile, failing to read the details, and get into a frenzy thinking I've been writing Apps for iPhone since 1994. :)

None of that is Apple's Enterprise Problem

[rshol]

Most people who work in enterprises don't work in IT so they don't care about admin tools etc. Most people work in marketing, sales, accounting, finance, logistics or manufacturing and all the software for all those departments runs on Windows. Middle market accounting software for Mac? Does not exist. Manufacturing/inventory control software for Mac? Nope. Contractor estimating/job costing? You get the picture.