The Apple Beat: Earnings are High and Education and Enterprise are wide open for Apple

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Apple is riding high on it's latest revenue earnings numbers.  Apple announced a record quarterly revenue of $46.33 billion and record quarterly net profit of $13.06 billion, or $13.87 per diluted share for Q4 2011.

“We’re thrilled with our outstanding results and record-breaking sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Apple’s momentum is incredibly strong, and we have some amazing new products in the pipeline.”

The promise of amazing products in the pipeline is very exciting for investors as well as for customers who are eager to see where Apple is investing its huge stash of cash and what products will come to market in 2012.

Where Apple goes, the Industry eventually follows. Just look at the smartphone, tablets and ultrabooks that are emerging of late.

Education and Enterpise, the Next Frontiers

Apple has made a big commitment to education through its iTunes U and iBooks 2 textbook initiative announced recently. While they have the three biggest educational publishers on board, which means that it will take some time to get a good volume of textbooks on to the service, Apple has also created a free authorship tool for anyone owning a Mac to create and design their own interactive books.

Education publishing is one area that needs a drastic shakeup and for the benefit of students, something like the iPad gives them fast access to the latest editions of textbooks plus all the learning guides, illustrations, quizzes and in a simple to use and interactive interface that is expected to be cheaper and more easy to distribute than heavy and expensive hardbound textbooks.

The endgame is to get as many iPads into schools and universities and to make them more of a standard. While no specific pricing schemes for educational customers have been announced by Apple, it is likely that once newer hardware is revealed then Apple might set something up to selling older model iPads to the educational market at lower prices so that schools and universities can easily buy into the program.

iOS  works for Enterprise

The iPhone and the iPad are being adopted in Enterprise at at an exponential rate in a way that Macs have never been. During the SIBOS banking conference in Toronto last year, I saw firsthand how bankers and executives had replaced their notebooks with iPads and were using these to take notes, run slideshows and carry all their reference material while taking care of email and schedules and they were having fun using their iPads for work.

This isn't an isolated case.

Forester released a study recently that found that Apple "Infiltrates the Enterprise and Reshapes, the Markets for Personal Devices At Work."

More than 21% of Information Workers use Apple Products for Work.

The report finds that  Apple’s products are much more visible in business environments than they used to be.

To quantify Apple’s business presence, Forrester surveyed almost 10,000 information workers — workers that use a computer for work an hour or more per day — across 17 countries globally and more than 3,350 IT hardware decision-makers in North America and Western Europe.

The survey of nearly 10,000 information workers finds that, globally, 21% of them use at least one Apple product for work: 11% use iPhones, 9% use iPads, 8% use Macs, and 5% use two or more Apple products.

A majority of companies will support Apple products in 2012, says Forrester, with 63% reporting support or interest in the Mac, 81% supporting or interested in iPad and 55% planning to officially support iPhone.

Forrester also predicts that Apple will "end Window's dominance" for current and future business leaders, "become the largest tech vendor by revenues in 2012," and "blunt Android in the enterprise with product consistency and a simpler ecosystem."

That's high praise and a very optimistic outlook for Apple who definitely has their sights set on the enterprise market, it will be interesing to see how Apple can improve its chances in enterprise since it is in a better position to get adopeted than Android or Windows Phone at this point.

There was a time where enterprise dictated what thecnology devices consumers would end up using. This is certainly changing as corporate IT departments are bowing to the dicatates of users who are asking for the devices that they want to use.