Apple’s secret strategy for enterprise success

Apple’s continued success in the enterprise isn’t just the happy consequence of a series of lucky accidents; it’s happening because — while masked by its consumer-focused marketing machine — the company pays close attention to what business customers need. 

Along with its customary business and focus on specific verticals, Apple has teams across the company who spend much of their time talking with enterprise partners, customers, and suppliers to identify pain points and figure out where to best spend internal development resources. 

What Apple offers the enterprise

It has armies to support the work. Consider its SMB-focused retail staff. Consider the many interactions that take place between Apple and business customers through its many services, AppleSeed for IT, Apple’s Enterprise Product Marketing Managers, its enterprise-focused developer relations teams, and its continued improvements to the tools it makes for enterprise partners, principally around device management and security. The company provides accredited training courses for IT professionals, offers deployment resources, publishes white papers such as the IDC Report on Mac security in the enterprise, and more. 

At the same time, Apple Business Manager and Apple Business Essentials provide sector-specific support and act as gateways through which to gather sector-specific data, giving its business-customer-focused teams access to the data they need to support the arguments they find.

Speaking and learning

What I’m saying is that Apple maintains a complex web of interaction points with business customers that show how their needs are being gathered, considered, discussed and acted upon across the entire company, with pockets of people dedicated to identifying what they are going to need down the road. 

Declarative Device Management, for example, answered a need many in business didn’t know they had until they understood what it could do for them. 

What’s amusing is that it’s still pretty easy to miss that all this work is taking place. That’s because the company tends to focus its big keynotes and presentations on its core products and higher-end consumer customers.

The insights into its work in enterprise tech that do slip through usually come in the form of a few words during the fiscal calls or a session track or two at WWDC. 

Why keep it quiet?

There are a couple of reasons Apple might have chosen to remain relatively modest concerning its work in this space. The first is reputational, the second tactical.

As I see it, it’s like this: 

Apple wants its wider public reputation to remain focused on aspirational consumers. The fear is that evangelizing its business credentials may sully its brand ID, in part perhaps because public perception of business computing has been sullied by the non-Apple experiences people have endured at work (which is probably why, when given a choice, employees get a Mac). 

Apple might also want to manage expectations. It is listening, and it will deal with the worst problems. But it also knows that by the time it gets to fix some problems, it might have identified a new and better approach as it develops new consumer technologies it already knows will enter tomorrow’s enterprise. 

What’s the next step?

All of this may seem reasonably obvious to anyone with first-hand experience of Apple’s business teams, but might be harder to accept by those who still believe the company is only focused on making consumer “toys.”

However, like the recently debunked argument that Apple’s systems are more expensive, nothing could be further from the truth. Just ask the world’s biggest companies, who are seeing rapid growth in their Apple deployments combined with higher employee satisfaction and productivity alongside reductions in tech support costs on the strength of those migrations.

None of this is accidental. Apple has engaged huge resources over many years in support of its enterprise market push. Now, it just needs reality to catch up while that gentle push becomes a shove.

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.