Apple and IBM on Wednesday released the first wave of mobile apps developed under their recently formed partnership to boost business adoption of iOS.
The new business tools, dubbed IBM MobileFirst for iOS apps, are geared towards users in the banking, retail, insurance, financial services, telecommunications, and airline industries, as well as the government. Several companies have already signed on to use the new apps, including Citi, Air Canada, Sprint, and Banorte.
"This is a big step for iPhone and iPad in the enterprise, and we can't wait to see the exciting new ways organizations will put iOS devices to work," Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said in a statement. "The business world has gone mobile, and Apple and IBM are bringing together the world's best technology with the smartest data and analytics to help businesses redefine how work gets done."
The apps, designed exclusively for the iPhone and iPad, can be customized for any organization, then easily deployed and managed, according to the partners. IBM and Apple said they will be "continuously" designing and developing additional apps for businesses.
Here are the details straight from Apple and IBM about their new apps:
- Item Plan Flight (travel and transportation): Addresses the major expense of all airlines—fuel—permitting pilots to view flight schedules, flight plans, and crew manifests ahead of time, report issues in-flight to ground crews, and make more informed decisions about discretionary fuel.
- Passenger+ (travel and transportation): Empowers flight crews to offer an unmatched level of personalized services to passengers in-flight—including special offers, re-booking, and baggage information.
- Advise & Grow (banking and financial markets): Puts bankers on premise with their small business clients, with secure authorization to access client profiles and competitive analyses, gather analytics-driven insights to make personalized recommendations, and complete secure transactions.
- Trusted Advice (banking and financial markets): Allows advisors to access and manage client portfolios, gain insight from powerful predictive analytics—in the client's kitchen or at the local coffee shop, rather than the advisor's office—with full ability to test recommendations with sophisticated modeling tools all the way to complete, secure transactions.
- Retention (insurance): Empowers agents with access to customers' profiles and history, including an analytics-driven retention risk score as well as smart alerts, reminders, and recommendations on next best steps and facilitation of key transactions like collection of e-signatures and premiums.
- Case Advice (government): Addresses the issue of workload and support among caseworkers who are making critical decisions, one family or situation at a time, on the go. The solution adjusts case priorities based on real-time analytics-driven insights, and assesses risk based on predictive analysis.
- Incident Aware (government): Converts an iPhone into a vital crime prevention asset, presenting law enforcement officers with real-time access to maps and video-feeds of incident locations; information about victim status, escalation risk, and crime history; and improved ability to call for back-up and supporting services.
- Sales Assist (retail): Enables associates to connect with customer profiles, make suggestions based on previous purchases and current selections, check inventory, locate items in-store, and ship out-of-store items.
- Pick & Pack (retail): Combines proximity-based technology with back-end inventory systems for transformed order fulfillment.
- Expert Tech (telecommunications): Taps into native iOS capabilities including FaceTime for easy access to expertise and location services for route optimization to deliver superior on-site service, more effective issue resolution and productivity as well as improved customer satisfaction.
Announced back in July, Apple and IBM's partnership was forged to help both companies take on rivals like Microsoft which control a big chunk of the business software market. Apple hopes to push deeper into the enterprise with the backing of traditional business software powerhouse IBM. For its part, Big Blue has fallen behind in the enterprise in recent years despite its illustrious history, and is perhaps hoping to get an injection of Apple's "cool" quotient.
"What we're delivering aims directly at the new quest of business—smart technologies that unlock new value at the intersection of big data and individual engagement," Bridget van Kralingen, senior vice president of IBM global business services, said in a statement.