
Why Android isn't gaining on Apple in the Enterprise - evo_9
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/01/28/why_android_isnt_gaining_on_apple_in_the_enterprise_.html
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pinaceae
Working for a company that serves big pharma, I have the following
observations:

The iPad is _the_ game changer for the mobile worker (pharma reps). Companies
are taking away their sales reps MS laptops/tablets and replacing them with
iPads. Why?

1., Unbreakable compared to classic hardware. Both in hardware as in software.
No moving parts, light, powerful enough, so easy to use that reps can't claim
anymore to be baffled by it. Cheap. No enterprise MS tablet PC comes close.

2., Far lower TCO, as the IT overhead is far lower. Virus Scanners? Custom OS
images? Gone. A fully controlled, curated environment. Even if a user installs
something, it will not break the system or steal your data. If an iPad gets
stolen/lost, remote wipe and buy a new one. Log in, restore, done. Apple
suddenly allows for bring your own hardware - the wet dream of enterprise IT.

3., Completely homogenic hardware, _globally_. This is the most important
point. Wherever you buy an iPad, from Brazil to Korea, it is exactly the same.
Same hardware, same OS. With notebooks? Lenovo, HP, Dell. And they change
their models all the time, warranting a new driver here, a different OS image
there.

4., The death of Blackberry is on the wall, making the iPhone the natural
successor - for the above points.

Now, what about the MacBooks and iMacs? Looking at my company, once the iPad
is in, those follow. If the majority of users is on iOS, there are no benefits
of being on Windows. Most admins like Unix-style anyhow, and OSX is a great UI
for that.

Managers are the ones left, and here the MacBook Air is gaining traction. It
is sleek, light, and works. Plus, IT can standardize on it. Also, as people
create slide decks, Keynote is seriously cool shit. Those presentations work
seamlessly on iPad, whereas PPT breaks. Strong incentive there to switch.

The last big footholds of MS in the Office are Excel and Outlook. But both are
available on OSX, and some argue in better shape than their Windows brethren.
The biggest gap of Apple is Excel on the iPad. Whoever releases a fully
compatible iOS Excel version/clone will accelerate the demise of MS in
enterprise desktops.

Servers are completely different discussion, the MS
Exchange/Sharepoint/Dynamics/SQL Server behemoth is here to stay. This
battleground will shift due to SaaS.

~~~
EnderMB
> 4., The death of Blackberry is on the wall, making the iPhone the natural
> successor - for the above points.

I can't speak for the pharmaceutical industry in America, but from what I've
noticed in the financial industry in the UK a lot of people are ditching their
Blackberry's and are moving to either Android or, surprisingly, WP7. One of
the large financial services companies I've worked with is switching all of
its employees to WP7 this year, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is where
Microsoft find their area.

~~~
Duff
WP7 is probably a good choice if you're a big Microsoft dev shop and are
actively developing custom tools. I've been told that development for WP7 is
pretty easy for existing .Net programmers.

All of this is great news for the industry -- a robust market is a good thing.

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potatolicious
I feel like there really only one primary cause of iOS's (unexpected)
enterprise success: it's a prestige phone.

We can wax poetic about the democratization of corporate IT processes, or
specific technologies, but IMO those are all herrings, or minor causes at
best.

At the end of the day, Apple introduced an incredibly prestigious product at
the very highest end of the market. It had cachet and desirability, and when
your SVP buys that drool-worthy envy-of-the-office phone, he damn well wants
to use it with his email, and damned what IT thinks of it.

I suspect Android's success in the enterprise space hinges on a similar
product - if someone can come up with the "oh my god I must have it" phone in
Android-land, the enterprise support will follow.

~~~
jsz0
In my experience that's pretty much the exact opposite of how enterprise IT
works. That's why we tend to end up with so much miserable hardware/software.
It's usually a calculation of cost/technical adequacy/ease-of-support. User
preference or usability in general is not a big concern. Many companies have
only recently begun to replace BlackBerries on a large scale. If you were
correct we would have seen huge adoption of the iPhone 3G in the enterprise 4
years ago or maybe the iPhone 3GS 3 years ago. It's a trend that has really
picked up only in the last 2 years or so on a large scale.

We have an IT company that is outsourced to handle all this stuff for us and
they only deploy iPhones. They recommend replacing BB/Android devices via
forklift upgrade. They actively do not support Android. If you're using
anything other than BB/iPhone you're on your own. This is just one company out
of probably thousands that provide similar services so maybe it's not a common
policy. It was pretty sobering to me though. It reminds me of the Mac in the
enterprise in years past. If you somehow managed to sneak one in the backdoor
you wouldn't actually be allowed to use it. If this is becoming a common
policy for Android devices then Google has a huge uphill battle. These types
of companies aren't going to be re-evaluating their policies very often.

~~~
beatle
Another reason: updates

No one, not even Google, the carrier or the manufacturer can guarantee if
you'll be able to install a security update on that Android phone you deployed
to 2,000 sales people 6 months ago.

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VengefulCynic
I've often heard it said that (nearly every time Apple in the Enterprise comes
up) the conventional wisdom is that Apple doesn't experience larger gains in
the enterprise because of the culture of secrecy whereby it doesn't give
advance information to large corporate buyers any more than it does to the
average consumer. It's something of a surprise to me that this wasn't
mentioned in this article.

Doubly so because a number of the other vendors of Android devices (Samsung,
Sony, LG, ASUS) have a much more favorable history on releasing information
about upcoming products so that enterprise support can be ready for them.
Also, a lack of that culture of secrecy would seem to be more favorable for
sharing more technical information up-front for deeper integration with
corporate partners. Whereas I don't get the impression that Apple really views
any enterprise customer as a partner, but rather as another customer.

~~~
alttag
Conversely, Apples does have a history of long-term support for the products
they do release, so in that sense, the future is extremely predicable ... more
so than other players in the mobile space. The predictability of support is
perhaps more valuable than the predictability of new shininess.

~~~
cageface
This is much more the case for Apple in mobile than in their other products.
The churn from OS 9 -> X, PPC -> Intel, and multiple breaking changes to APIs
etc over the same time period made supporting Macs at the "enterprise" level
quite challenging.

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abruzzi
As a member of an enterprise IT, and one that has been involved in out testing
and decision making I'd put it down to three things:

1\. Android support for Exchange is generally awful. I can't speak for ICS,
but many of the android phones we tested wouldn't do calendar sync, or would
randomly stop receiving emails, requiring hard resets, or would have little to
no global address lookup. In contrast, iOS has had very good exchange support
since at least iOS 3, and it is rock solid.

2\. Android still doesn't work with our Cisco VPN, iOS has since at least v3.

3\. Beyond the internet and PIM software, we have been more successful finding
quality apps. Too many apps on both platforms are lightweight things without
much use in a business environment, but there are some decent application to
be found on iOS (the Omnigroup apps come to mind.). There is also better
support from business focused companies like VMware, ESRI, Autodesk, and all
the conferencing companies like WebEx.

~~~
michaelcampbell
I must be walking under a silver lined cloud; I've had an original droid since
launch day over 2 years ago, and now an ICS Galaxy Nexus since launch day, and
the Exchange integration has been better than my Windows PC, by and large.
I've never had any of the issues you mention. I don't doubt you've had them,
but I have not. I frequently get "dinged" on my phone for new email before
Outlook. (I will admit that deleting a mail on outlook takes up to 5 minutes
to "be gone" on the Android.)

But never any calendar issues. Never any dropped mails. Never any needs to
"hard reset". Lookups work as well on my phone as they do on outlook, for me.

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stoked
The fragmentation mentioned in the article to me highlights one of the main
reasons why enterprises shy away from Android. On iOS, there is ONE
email/calendar client with a known set of features/limitations. On android,
almost every manufacturer has their own email client and their varying feature
sets and bugs are not documented anywhere. For example:
<http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4760> How many posts in
there are from google employees stating that it's not their problem because
the email client the person is complaining about isn't written by google?

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newbusox
I feel like one of the major changes in a Steve Jobs-less Apple is going to be
an increased emphasis on the corporate market. This was historically one of
the major differences between Apple (focused on end-users) and Microsoft
(primarily focused on corporate enterprises--Paul Allen has a lot to say about
this in his recent biography). To see Apple succeeding in this market is
pretty exciting for them.

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swasheck
our company wont go android because of the inability to remote wipe and the
open android app store.

~~~
tensor
You can remote wipe (among other enterprise things) using google apps for
business and the google apps device policy app.

[http://support.google.com/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...](http://support.google.com/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=190930)

