

Apple in the cloud: what if Apple doesn’t have cloud plans?Īpple has historically been quite a secretive company, and it hasn’t made any comments on its intentions with this bank of heavyweight cloud hires. It may also be looking at cloud offerings for underserved sectors in SME to start with, where its plug-and-play ethos might play well, even running at a slight premium. It has the investment clout to go into market, and might think it can improve cloud computing for many business customers. Apple’s traditional growth pots have slowed, meaning it needs to explore new revenue streams. Apple in the cloud: are the cloud rumours true?Ĭould be. They include Michael Crosby, an ex-Docker engineer who is credited with the design of modern containers, Arn Gupta and Maksym Pavlenko, formerly of AWS, and Francesc Campoy, an ex-Google employee who has been tasked with working on Apple’s Kubenetes development. But a spate of new hires has galvanised rumours of a cloud push. The company announced a $10 billion data centre construction investment in 2018. There have been mutterings in the cloud community for a while about Apple’s possible entry into the commercial cloud market. Can it compete? Apple in the cloud: what’s behind the cloud rumours? If it pursues an enterprise approach, it’s going head-to-head with experience at scale. It would also need to be compatible with an array of different architectures and that’s before it can demonstrate a value proposition. If Apple takes its all-in approach to the commercial market, it’ll be laughed out of the boardroom, so it would need to integrate with existing infrastructure tools, such as container management system Kubernetes.

Apple in the cloud: what’s the business angle for cloud? It has pretty design on its side, and it’s seamless if all your devices are manufactured by Apple, and particularly if you use Apple productivity tools, such as Pages, Numbers and Keynote.
APPLE CLOUD SERVICES FOR BUSINESS PC
iCloud on PC has been compared unfavourably to Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive.
APPLE CLOUD SERVICES FOR BUSINESS FULL
And, like much of Apple’s previous products (we’re thinking back to iTunes) it doesn’t play quite so nicely if you don’t subscribe to the full Apple ecosystem. Perhaps it seems too buttoned-down for a company that wants to present itself as a maverick inventor, a champion of liberalism, education and arts? Maybe it realises that financial directors are unlikely to sign off on pretty boxes that come with a pretty price tag? Or perhaps it’s just been waiting for computing to come out of rack mounts before making its move? Apple in the cloud: what’s the history?Īpple already has a consumer cloud offering – iCloud – that it offers to users for storage of files, media and photos. Apple hasn’t been a big player in enterprise computing to date, nor has it shown any particular desire to enter the space.
