Last week, on September 28th, Apple and Deloitte announced their new partnership. Now, you may ask yourself what a company best known for its consultancy and audit services has to do with Apple. With IT and technology-enabled business strategy playing an increasing role in today’s organizations, Deloitte established the Technology Infrastructure Transformation practice within Deloitte Consulting. The aim of this branch is to “increase agility and scalability, lower risk and improve service quality” of clients’ operations by leveraging technology (1). That’s where iOS comes into play.
The partnership is meant to bring together Apple’s engineering and design capabilities with Deloitte’s strategy and implementation expertise. Concretely, Deloitte set up a dedicated Apple practice consisting of over 5,000 advisors to help businesses improve their operations by designing and implementing solutions for their iOS devices (2, 3).
In addition, the two firms are collaborating in creating a new offering in Deloitte Consulting, namely the EnterpriseNext. Its goal is to enable clients to exploit mobile opportunities along three pillars (2):
- Discover – EnterpriseNext offers value maps for iOS that will show clients where high impact mobile opportunities lie, as well as how to align those opportunities and prioritize them.
- Define – iOS workshops to quickly transform prototypes into custom solutions.
- Implement – in-house development teams to create native apps that easily integrate with clients’ existing technologies, such as ERP and CRM systems.
Despite being the first of its kind, this partnership should not be a big surprise. First of all, Apple has entered several enterprise-focused partnerships with other companies such as IBM, Cisco and SAP over the past months (4). Second, Deloitte has already transformed more than 50 organizations with iOS devices and developed hundreds of apps for clients (4). Third, Deloitte itself is one of the largest corporate iOS users, with employees currently making use of over 120,000 iPhones (that’s a considerable amount taking into account that the firm has 244,000 employees) (4).
Overall, with a slowdown of product sales in the consumer market and the launch of the iPad Pro series, expanding the Apple ecosystem into the corporate world appears to be a wise move.
Sources:
1 http://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/technology/solutions/technology-infrastructure-transformation-services.html
2 http://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/about-deloitte/articles/press-releases/deloitte-announces-enterprise-next-with-apple.html
3 http://www.apple.com/newsroom/2016/09/apple-and-deloitte-team-up-to-accelerate-business-transformation-on-iphone-and-ipad.html
4 http://www.computerworld.com/article/3126289/digital-transformation/apple-products-essential-to-the-modern-workforce-deloitte.html
