As rivals dally, Apple gets even more serious about iPads in business

Well into the second year of the tablet phenomenon, research firms such as IDC and Gartner still can’t bring themselves to recognize iPads as computing devices. Instead, they’re labeled as media tablets — the same category as e-book readers — despite the fact iPads are one of the fastest-adopted computing devices ever in corporate environments.

Tablets from putative business competitors such as Hewlett-Packard and Research in Motion stumble, lacking the same level of business applications or, in the case of the HP TouchPad, the same level of business manageability and security as the iPad. They talk business but aren’t seriously delivering.

Meanwhile, Apple continues to push iPad adoption in business, despite its public consumer focus. The latest move is Apple’s new volume purchase system for iOS apps (PDF), announced this week. On the face of it, it’s an obvious decision: Let companies set up a single master account for iOS app purchases, buy apps in bulk, then provide a simple installation link for each employee. (If you use a mobile device management system to distribute mobile apps, you can distribute the volume apps through it.) That’s basically how any volume licensing program works.

RIM’s BlackBerry App World does allow volume licenses, managed by the software vendor, and Android app developers can provide volume licenses if they manage the app distribution directly. But neither is a universal approach to volume licensing as Apple is providing.

Apple also added the option of private app sales through its App Store mechanism. This lets companies buy apps built by third parties especially for them. Previously, Apple’s required use of the App Store to install iOS apps meant that companies either had to buy the equivalent of shrinkwrapped software — apps available to anyone — or build their own software and handle distribution by themselves. Now they can buy apps someone else made that are not generally available.

The private app sales is a case of Apple playing catch-up; Android, BlackBerry, and WebOS all allow direct installation of apps, rather than require the use of an app store for all installations. But Apple’s approach means that businesses have a common source for buying and installing apps, so management should be simpler than on other platforms.

As I said, the idea of a volume licensing system is an old one, and the private sales mechanism is Apple’s way of allowing custom app sales without giving up its controlled app store model. You could say that Apple is just acting like any other enterprise software vendor — and you’d be right.

What’s meaningful, though, is that Apple is the only mobile vendor acting this way. That’s both a real surprise and an indication of how strongly Apple believes in the iPad and iPhone as the new “post-PC” platform it will use to displace both the old-guard PC vendors and the old-guard-mentality mobile vendors. It’s a move that old enterprise hands HP and Microsoft should have made from the get-go for WebOS and Windows Phone 7, respectively. They didn’t, but Apple now has.

Whe it comes to business focus, Apple’s actions speak louder than its competitors’ words.

This article, “As others dally, Apple gets even more serious about iPads in business,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.