That's the thing, though: Even in enterprise, what's the penetration of Windows Phone? Probably similar to Blackberry--a rounding error. iPhones account for something like 80% of US corporate phones--it's by far the dominant enterprise handheld platform.
It doesn't matter--at all--that SAP is oriented around Microsoft as the server/workstation platform. Mobile is a different game, and Microsoft's mobile position is nonexistent, while Apple's is extremely strong at the enterprise level. SAP can and most certainly will do things with iOS while using a MS backend.
Do you think IBM is expecting Macs to be the server or desktop platform paired with any of the business-centric iOS apps they're building?
On an unrelated note, it's funny when I read something like this or the IBM announcement, and think "Ooh, that's a really big company." And then I realize that while SAP is indeed a huge company, Apple is ten times larger in everything but workforce, which is still twice as large. As someone who's been following Apple since the 80s, I still catch myself forgetting, occasionally, just how huge the company is now.
Not exactly. I do SAP in a validated GXP environment - we seriously looked at mobile and the amount of work to get what the business needed at that level via iOS (looking at iPads originally) was a no sell. Even looked at this for non-US regional models. SAP didn't have a decent usable answer (2014-2015). All my current development is based on Windows environment. The reports and transaction outputs/inputs don't scale and custom work was cost prohibitive - having to build twice to present the same info. Regional or Global models it just wasn't worth it.
I would love to see something decent come out of this partnership.
Disclaimer: I live in a global manufacturing and procurement world in SAP that is heavily regulated.