In 2012 PWC (one of the most successful financial institutions in the country) spent over $3.6 million USD to give every partner in the company an ipad. This did not include expenditures which are still occuring to this day. Unfortunately, Apple’s recent and more vigorous re-positioning as a provider of business services apparently came too late for the consulting giant. According to members of the PWC’s current IT Staff the switch to Google Apps For Work was decided upon well before the recent ICloud security incident, though it may become a factor in its expedience.
The Entire distribution and usage process was hampered by three major issues. First, the proprietary PWC apps, Apple’s Icloud, and chosen third party business applications could not communicate with each other. Second, the setup process which involved unpacking, activating, and installing applications took far longer than anticipated. Third, the users had no intentions of changing their work habits. Things like having to connect the ipad to a PC in order to transfer large documents just didn’t make sense. It quickly became apparent that Ipad, and by extension ICloud business solutions had yet to mature enough to handle large scale business needs.
Today After about two years and millions of dollars more spending the partners are overwhelmingly doing what most people do with the ipad. Watching video, surfing the web, and checking email. In a few months PWC will switch to Google apps for . Users won’t have to connect to a pc to share large files or collaborate in real time. Device Administrators will be able to manage users from their phones and tablets improving uptime exponentially. Most importantly the app suite includes native, web version, and third party applications. Most of which can run in the chrome browser.
I hope those partners are ready to actually do some work on those ipads. At least now they’ll have the tools.
