Apple dreams of an iPad cloud for enterprise zombies

All Hallow's Eve is soon to be upon us, dear readers. And there's nothing spookier or more bone-chilling than a middle-aged tech writer trying to force bad horror film analogies into yet another iPad launch post-game analysis.

I watched, of course, along with everyone else, the fall Apple launch event which among other things, brought us two shiny new tablets, the iPad Air and the long-awaited iPad mini with Retina Display.

I'm not going to go into the purely spec-oriented and technical aspects of the devices, as well as an analysis of what this might mean for the competition's offerings in the consumer market. That would be a repetitious waste of time.

This has already been written about ad-nauseum by our own resident vampires and all the other ghouls who have already successfully leeched the life out of your grubby mouse-clicking fingers in order to give them drops of your precious pageviews.

Frankly, I'm not interested in the consumer market. What the kiddies and the pond scum do with their torture toys has no bearing really in what I write about, and frankly, neither should it matter to any IT decision maker or anyone who has to deal with line of business applications in a large enterprise. 

And unless you've been a troll sleeping under an old stone bridge, you're probably aware there's a trend to move those lines of business applications increasingly towards the cloud. Clouds which will not only host enterprise applications and data but also provide services in the form of APIs which devices will consume.

Earlier this summer I paid some attention to what this service-oriented landscape currently looks like, mostly from the consumer perspective. And the more I look at it, the more I realize that Apple's service-oriented strategy is increasingly mirroring its developer ecosystem: a walled garden in a creepy castle.

Cupertino is going to need really tall plants to keep the zombies from escaping.

Sure, lots of people currently bring iPads to work. They use messaging and calendaring services through the iPad's excellent (licensed) Exchange connectivity and they connect to web applications as well as critical line of business Windows applications through Citrix and now even through Microsoft's native RDS.

And while Apple doesn't provide these tools themselves, there are excellent corporate MDM solutions for managing iOS devices, from a number for industry players, including Cisco, Citrix, Microsoft and Good Technology.

Today, the iPad is an active participant in the on-premises world, most of it due to enterprises and 3rd-party vendors having to do the heavy lifting to accommodate them and create work-arounds for a device that is not inherently tailored for business. But just how long is that going to persist for?

We know the future of line of business applications is not going to be strictly on-premises applications, and it is going to be with clouds and SaaS -- more immediately we're going to see a transition towards hybridized, "mashup" type scenarios where organizations pick best-of-breed SaaS and web services living at different cloud providers and mix it with data providers on and off-premises.

So while the iPad lives comfortably within the enterprise as a tolerated squatter today, the future is not so certain. Apple has already shown from its most recent display of "free" software bravado that it wants productivty users to use iCloud and iWork, as opposed to Office or other alternatives. 

The kicking and blood curdling screams from Apple's user base have already started.

While Apple has shown essentially zero interest in creating a canvas for enterprise users, leaving this to the developers to fill the void, it will eventually become intolerant to other parties stepping in on their limited squishy turf.

As we know from history, the company is an absolute control-freak when it comes to the end-user experience and will not permit "duplication of functionality" and anything else they can shove into their Developer Agreement in order to protect that creepy walled garden. 

Apple tolerates Amazon, Google's and Microsoft's apps which use their own respective cloud services on iOS today. But we know that this could change at any time if Apple feels their position is threatened in any way.

If the tone of Tim Cook's comments during the first moments of his opening speech at Apple's most recent product launch is of any indication, the company absolutely does have considerable insecurities about its competitors moving into their space.  

Cook, a former IBMer, should know better. Enterprises aren't consumers. They don't like to be told by vendors what they can and cannot do and they hate having restrictions imposed on them. They want their data to be portable, they hate lock-in, and they may have their own special requirements that may prevent them from using a one size fits all Cloud.

As Apple faces more competition from the companies that actually know how to run public clouds that cater directly to the enterprise -- Amazon, Microsoft, Google and IBM, as well as from other providers which will create competitive or specialized cloud services -- the value of Apple's DNA-bottlenecked platform and ecosystem diminishes. 

For Apple to have its devices and its services not be handicapped within the enterprise, they need to embrace standards for interoperability and data portability, as well as an ongoing willingness to play nice with other cloud providers, a subject that I touched upon two years ago but is becoming much more of a concern today. 

I don't foresee Apple playing nice in a cloud and service-oriented world. But hey, enterprises. Take your chances. Trick or Treat!