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Apple enterprise VP to leave without replacement?

updated 09:35 am EST, Wed November 12, 2008

Apple enterprise VP gone?


The senior VP of Apple's enterprise sales division is leaving the company and will not be replaced, reports claim. Al Shipp, said to have been with Apple since 2004, is departing for places and reasons unknown. His immediate subordinates will instead have to follow John Brandon, the senior VP of sales for the Americas and Asia-Pacific. These include Stuart Maclennan, a director of territory sales; David Puklin, a director of named accounts; and Ron Police, the VP for federal and governmental sales.

If Apple is indeed not searching for a replacement, it could represent either a general reorganization within the company, or a move further away from the enterprise world. Apple has never made special effort to appeal to corporate clients, and in fact eliminated the Xserve RAID earlier this year. This is despite a growing adoption of Macs in the enterprise world, which rose from 1.1 percent in October 2006 to 4.5 percent in June 2007.


by MacNN Staff

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TAGS :

 enterprise, Xserve, jobs, Apple

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  1. freshh20

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Nov 2008

    +2
    11/12, 10:06am | report spam | (1 reply) Reply |

    enterprise = server

    Is this a quickly designed move to counter IBM claims that Apple competes directly in the server market. Therefore, the 1 year no compete clause must be upheld with Papermaster. Should Apple determine Papermaster is that important to the consumer side of business they could drop enterprise that they never committed to to begin with. Will education follow?

  1. Guest

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Nov 1999

    +3
    11/12, 11:40am | report spam | (1 reply) Reply |

    Upset he is.....

    Al Shipp became extremely upset with Apple's move to systematically kill all enterprise inroads. The X-Serve RAID was eliminated, firewire was eliminated, and ALL professional applications will probably be eliminated.

    All of Apple is high on the consumer buck, don't care about enterprise, and don't care about professionals anymore.

    It's all about the iPhone, gadgets, and consumer stuff. How sad.

  1. JimmyLib

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Nov 2006

    -2
    11/12, 12:09pm | report spam | Reply |

    Apple to acquire...

    Sun MicroSystems within the next 6-9 months thus planting a very large stake in the ground regarding the enterprise markets. (Just my somewhat educated and speculative guess)

  1. lkrupp

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: May 2001

    -6
    11/12, 12:50pm | report spam | Reply |

    Enterprise=Bad for Apple

    As a long time consumer level Apple user I don't want Apple in the enterprise, ever. Catering to the enterprise means dumbing down the product. The enterprise wants cheap, non-desrcript boxes. The enterprise demands the status quo, not innovation. The enterprise is all about supporting legacy systems forever with no forward movement. The enterprise wants "good enough" not excellence. I personally know someone now retired from IBM. He still freelances by making service calls on 30 and 40 year old systems. Why replace it when it still works is the motto.

    Apple needs to stay as far away from the enterprise as possible. They are quite profitable, successful by any definition of the term, and innovative. The enterprise is poison to a company like Apple.

  1. testudo

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Aug 2001

    -5
    11/12, 02:06pm | report spam | (1 reply) Reply |

    Re: Enterprise=bad

    Catering to the enterprise means dumbing down the product.

    Sorry, but Apple already 'dumbs down' the product by making it 'easy to use'. If anything, one would argue that the enterprise would want them to 'complex-up' the computer, so they can make sure they stay employed.

    The enterprise wants cheap, non-desrcript boxes. The enterprise demands the status quo, not innovation.

    OMG! Someone wants cheap? How dare they! And wanting the 'status quo' does not mean they also don't want innovation. Its just the enterprise doesn't have the desire or need to seed out fancy whiz-bang new products immediately when it is released. Who the h*** does?

    But NONE of this stops Apple from innovating. It certainly would be possible for Apple to add to their current enterprise segment a line of enterprise computers (one based off the mini, one off the iMac, plus the towers, of course). This would have no effect on their current product lines (esp. if they use the same case designs).

    The enterprise is all about supporting legacy systems forever with no forward movement.

    No, what they want (and most people, but apparently not those like you) is to have computers that support the equipment and software they've already invested $$$ in.

    Not everyone wants to spend thousands of dollars on new hardware because Apple decides "Meh, we don't like firewire anymore".

    The enterprise wants "good enough" not excellence.

    Well, not even Apple has 'excellence', so it's a moot point.

  1. testudo

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Aug 2001

    -2
    11/12, 02:13pm | report spam | (1 reply) Reply |

    legacy

    Why replace it when it still works is the motto.

    Isn't this the credo of the "Macs are cheaper than PCs" people? Macs last longer. Macs are usable longer.

    But now, if its an IT department that wants it to last longer, it stifles innovation? Hmmm, that would be a shocker to those people running 5-10 year old macs, still using OS 9.

    h***, read some reader reports on Macintouch. There's a recent discussion about Hypercard. And there's more people than you would think who still use it (and daily). And who remembers the last time Hypercard was updated?

    And maybe you should go with your friend on one of his service calls, and give the company guys a presentation on how cheap it would be to convert their 30 year old mainframes over to a couple of xserves. Don't forget you'll need to include the cost of rewriting and testing all the software, transferring all data, and working out all other details. I'm sure they just think its cheaper to keep 30 year old equipment running.

    Oh, and if you can tell them where they can get the funding to do the project, they'd like that too.

  1. bauhaus

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Sep 2003

    +2
    11/12, 02:38pm | report spam | Reply |

    What Enterprise wants

    It's proper that Apple kills of the enterprise division. I worked at a company where I decided I'd convert some of the servers and storage to Apple (about a 1/4 million investment.) Service SUCKED from Apple. They didn't hold to any of their agreements on onsite service when there were hardware failures and constantly made excuses that replacement parts were not available. This is in the LA Metro area -- so we're not taking a small town.Compared, Dell, HP,

  1. gentooq

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Aug 2008

    +4
    11/12, 04:32pm | report spam | Reply |

    Apple missed the boat . .

    when it comes to the Enterprise.

    I work for a company that has 225,000 desktops. This company is near the end of a Proof-of-Technology (POT) project to evaluate the use of Macintosh desktops and laptops. I feel eminently qualified to respond to previous commentary. Do us all a favor and do NOT simply flame me if you disagree, because I do have a small amount of background here . . . and for what it's worth, I have been using Macintoshes of one flavor or another for the past 23 years . . . and YES I like them a lot.

    The goal of the POT was to determine how to create, deploy and support an Enterprise Standard Macintosh. This does not simply mean handing hardware with the default installed OS on it and telling the user "have a good day."

    Creating a Standard means putting all of the applications into an image that will enable the users to get their work done. It means determining how the users will log on to the existing corporate infrastructure. It means identifying the gap issues (e.g., no OS support for MS Project, no OS support for MS Visio, no OS support for MS Access, etc.) and determining how they will be addressed. It means working out account security, disk/folder encryption and key recovery/escrow, anti-malware/anti-virus, off line authentication when AD is not available, authentication integration into AD (the corporate platform for which the Apple-provided AD plug-in does NOT work properly, etc.

    Deploying covers everything from original image installation on the machine, to delivery to the end-user, and on to patches, updates, new software package installation, etc. It has to be smooth, predictable and flawless at the 98% and higher level of precision.

    Support covers the gamut as well, with questions like "How do we get an Apple tech (or contracted tech) to come on-site and repair broken machines within an acceptable window?", "How do we get spares for critical repairs that must be done in-house (hard drive swaps, memory swaps, optical drive replacement, keyboard replacement), etc.?", "Can we make the OS actually display an error on screen when the user gets their credentials wrong versus the indeterminate screen shaking?"

    Support most importantly can NOT be MORE difficult that for the already existing Windows base. This means it can not take longer for the tech staff to come to a resolution of a user issue for Macintosh than it does for Windows.

    All of this I got directly from the in-house engineer working on the POT, in a conversation yesterday.

    . . . continued below

  1. gentooq

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Aug 2008

    +3
    11/12, 04:33pm | report spam | (1 reply) Reply |

    missed the boat (cont'd)

    As much as I love my Macintosh, I have to admit that in order to contemplate deploying it inside THIS enterprise, Apple has to "Think Different." I do NOT believe that Apple has to imitate Dell or HP or Microsoft. I DO believe that they have to think about adding products that are NOT consumer focused to their product line. These products are NOT more machines. These products are things like a corporate iPhone Management Server (essentially an in-enterprise iTunes Music Store without hooks into the Apple commercial music/video/apps library), an AD plug-in or system extension that WORKS, the ability to actually control user access based on AD credentials (I hate AD but it's the directory in most enterprise spaces), etc.

    Until I accidentally ran into one of the Apple Enterprise Engineers at RSA last year, I didn't even KNOW that they HAD any kind of an enterprise group. Over the last year, I have come to the conclusion that the enterprise group within Apple is more like a skunkworks, but one without enough reach or influence within Apple to fix the items that truly irk the enterprises out there that would very much like to be able to carry a Corporate Standard Macintosh alongside their existing Corporate Standard Windows.

    Apple does not have to become a different company, they just have to use their existing engineering prowess to solve some problems that make enterprise use as wonderful and home use is.

    I am rooting for Apple in the enterprise space, I really am, but it doesn't look good right now.

  1. Guest

    Fresh-Faced Recruit

    Joined: Nov 1999

    +5
    11/12, 05:55pm | report spam | Reply |

    speculation...

    I dont wanna speculate such a bad thing, but do you realize people at high positions are started to leave one by one...

    There is a bad smell in the air looks like, but i hope not.

    I hope all these not leading to Steve being seriously sick and unthinkable may happen depsite all the denials...

    It would explain why people are leaving in order to avoid caos that awaits Apple should something happen to Steve... I hope it is not happening...

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