Alliance Background
IBM and Apple announced on July 16 that they would cooperate with each other in the enterprise mobile software field. According to their plan, IBM is going to release its enterprise applications for iPad and iPhone, and Apple will provide around-the-clock service for enterprise customers.
The burial of the hatchet between the 30-year rivals is because the industry has gone through a major change compared to the 1970s. IBM sold its PC business unit to Lenovo in 2004 and server business last year to focus on enterprise software, which resulted in the formation of complementary relations between Apple and IBM. Apple is planning to expand the influence of iOS by means of IBM’s enterprise software, while IBM is going to beef up its software segment with the mobile ecosystem of Apple.
“98 percent of the Fortune 500 companies are using iPhones and iPads, and 92 percent of the 500 largest corporations in the world are using our mobile devices,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook, adding, “Companies will be able to enhance their working efficiency with the iOS versions of IBM’s big data analysis solutions.”
Industry experts predict that such cooperation among global IT giants will continue down the road, as the sector is changing more and more rapidly. The trend is particularly conspicuous in the open-source software and cloud computing segments.
In this context, IBM kicked off the Power Chip Consortium last year to open the power chip field. The purpose of the consortium is to cooperate for the development of power chip technology with Google, Nvidia, etc. IBM is intending to contain the growth of the x86 chipset of Intel and AMD in the server segment.
In the meantime, Red Hat Software and Google held hands with each other in April in the cloud computing industry. In the partnership, Red Hat is allowed to use enterprise Linux on the Google Cloud and Google is anticipating to attract more cloud computing service customers.
Also, Google and Adobe released open-source fonts supporting the Korean, Chinese, and Japanese languages. The two companies have been in rivalry in the photo editing software industry with Photoshop and Picasa.
Two other examples of the complicated relations are the release of the Microsoft Office for iPad and the comprehensive cooperation among Microsoft, Google, IBM, Oracle, Red Hat and SAP in various sectors ranging from platform to hardware and solution. They are trying to create a new business model characterized by market sharing after market expansion based on not competition but collaboration.
Under the circumstances, some experts point out such collaborations could have a negative impact on the business of Korean IT small companies that have yet to achieve the economy of scale.