Wall Street investment banking icon JPMorgan Chase & Co. is giving iPads to every associate in its global investment banking division, according to a company e-mail obtained by Bloomberg News. Employees receiving the devices will get to keep them free of charge as long as they remain at the unit until the pilot program ends on May 1, 2011, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
Industry analysts viewed the move as a significant victory for Apple in its quest to wrest control of the Enterprise communications submarket away from Research in Motion, Ltd., whose Blackberry handheld devices have been a ubiquitous companion of “serious businesspeople” for more than a decade.
“For the first time you have a viable alternative to secure mobile communications,” said Brian Marshall, an analyst at Gleacher & Co. “We see people moving away from the BlackBerry platform in droves in favor of the iPhone and the iPad,” he added, predicting “this is a sign of the times and will continue in the future.”
With a 95 percent share of the emerging market for tablet computers, Apple’s iPad is poised to expand from its traditional consumer base into the corporate market, while RIM still works on rolling out its rival device, the BlackBerry PlayBook.
As BlackBerry contracts on their employees’ devices come to an end, some big-name corporations are beginning to taste the kool-aid: Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse Group AG both unveiled applications for the iPad recently and Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. are considering letting employees use iPhones instead of BlackBerrys, according to some reports.
More than 80 percent of Fortune 500 companies are “deploying or piloting” the iPhone, Apple said in its October 18 quarterly report, which CEO Steve Jobs sees as a major shift in Apple’s Enterprise prospects.
“We’ve now passed RIM and I don’t see them catching up with us in the foreseeable future,” Jobs said in the quarterly earnings call with analysts. “They must move beyond their area of strength and comfort into the unfamiliar territory of trying to become a software platform company.”
It remains to be seen whether RIM will produce a device that rivals the iPad for its ease of accessing e-mails, contacts, calendar and attachments via Microsoft Outlook, or whether it will be useful for marking-up and annotating confidential documents and making client presentations.
And once the PlayBook is out in circulation Apple is likely to soon roll out the next generation of iPads, raising the bar even higher.
Absent a major pratfall by the designers in Cupertino — or the manufacturers in China — it’s difficult not to envision more and more “serious businesspeople” using Apple gear to navigate the unpredictable streams of commerce.
