MobileIron CEO: Apple-IBM Partnership Signals 'The Death Of The Desktop'

Apple and IBM's recently announced partnership signaled their desire to take on the mobile business world together, in a move leaving many industry executives to ponder what that will look like and how it will impact the workplace and the future of PCs.

"Interestingly from a historical perspective, IBM and Microsoft started working together in the late 80s, early 90s, and that sort of heralded the beginning of the PC era," said Bob Tinker, CEO of MobileIron, a leader in the Enterprise Mobile Management space. "At some level, the IBM-Apple partnership that’s now happening around IBM building applications for mobility, I think signals the end of the PC-era and the death of the desktop, and really the beginning of the new mobile-first era."

The deal brings together Apple, a leader in the consumer mobile market, and IBM's profound presence in the space for enterprise solutions and services. IBM will provide enterprise-level customized applications, services and solutions on iOS devices as an Apple reseller to businesses as a result of the partnership.

[Related: MobileIron Q2 Comes In Better Than Expected]

Tinker sees his company benefiting from the Apple-IBM partnership as he sees it expanding the mobile industry and accelerating adoption of mobility for large companies. This expansion of the mobile enterprise, will result in demand for the stationary desktop workstation to contract, according to Tinker.

MobileIron was recognized in the Gartner Magic Quadrant as a top-tier, world-wide EMM solutions provider. It supports iOS, Android, Windows, Windows Phone, OS X and recently announced support for the new Amazon Fire Phone.

"The future desktops and laptops are not going to be desktops and laptops. They are actually really a mobile operating system with a bigger battery, screen and keyboard," Tinker said. "There is a paradigm shift that is happening where the future of computing will be mobile, and the form factor may look like a desktop or laptop. And that’s an enormous transition for the industry to go through. You’re seeing Apple harmonize Mac OS and iOS. You’re seeing Windows 8.1 phone and Windows 8.1 desktop are fundamentally based on the same operating system model. So the future of computing is coming together, and it’s actually based on mobile operating systems in different form factors."

The MobileIron CEO welcomes the change that he anticipates happening sooner than most expect, as he pointed to newer desktop operating systems, such as Windows 8.1 and the soon to come OS X Yosemite, as harmonized versions of its maker’s mobile operating systems.

Next: PC Sales See Q2 Improvement

Still, industry statistics show there's still life in the PC market. Worldwide sales declined 1.7 percent in the second quarter this year, according to IDC. It was the smallest decline in the market since the second quarter of 2012. The U.S. PC market actually saw growth of 6.9 percent in the second quarter, as the tablet market continues to slow.

Some industry executives don't see doom for PC sales.

"We've been saying for a very long time that it’s not the end of PC-era, but rather it’s more accurate to think of the current state as the PC-plus era as organizations are adding devices rather than taking devices away," said Ira Grossman, CTO of end user and mobile computing for MCPc, a nationwide MobileIron and Apple partner specializing in mobile solutions with its Anyplace Workspace. "I would agree that desktop deployments have stalled, but have been replaced with laptops or thin clients and not tablets. These additional devices all require some form of lifecycle management and must be procured, provisioned, deployed, maintained, secured, retired and finally refreshed. Along the way, applications are re-factored to take advantage of what MobileIron calls the mobile-first era."

Grossman said that we have yet to see an operating system that can handle content creation in a fully mobile form factor, and that’s why he sees multiple form factors existing for many years. He then referenced a quote from Dell CEO Michael Dell: "The PC is still how business gets done."

PUBLISHED AUG. 4, 2014