[CASH]

Apple has now hired a 5th Enterprise sales employee from RIM. They've hired them all within the last year and a half.

These men will all get coal for X-Mas :

Geoff Perfect was head of strategic sales
Joe Bartlett was a senior global sales manager
Steve Marshall was a global strategic account manager
Peter Decker was a global account manager
Paul Alvarez was a global strategic account manager

Apple Is Hiring RIM's Enterprise Sales Employees

[lssanjose]

Plot thickens, eh? . Talking about lack of competitiveness. I can't believe I didn't think about it then, but it just makes sense. Take the best pieces of man power away from your competitor.

[aznlgcy]

Haha just plain sneaky of Apple

[CASH]

Ball's in your court RIM. Watcha gonna do?

[avt123]

Ball's in your court RIM. Watcha gonna do?

Hopefully not sit and watch everything go down like they have for the past year. Bring on the QNX! The more competition the better.

[lssanjose]

Yeah, I'd rather see them try a half-court shot once, or twice, at least!

[mark_rivers19]

i didn't know APPLE and New York Yankees are synonyms.

[MartyMcfly]

Things like this happens all the time..... Sucks for R.I.M though..

[ignites]

it could just be that apple hired the dept head and he just hooked up his crew to apple. Not necessarily a blatant steal....

Who knows... I'd never worked for Steve Jobs. (But I worked for rim before).

[JRSCCivic98]

That's not all they're hiring from RIM. But of course, not all picks are always the best.

[Jake Storm]

Plot thickens, eh? . Talking about lack of competitiveness. I can't believe I didn't think about it then, but it just makes sense. Take the best pieces of man power away from your competitor.

I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that these were the "best pieces of man power" at RIM.

[grahamf]

I'd worry if they we in software/hardware development, but they're just salespeople.

Probably to either get a better understanding what enterprise customers want, or (more likely) Jobs thinks that all he needs are RIM's salespeople to convince business to buy Apple products like they buy RIM products.

In other words: I fail to see how this would improve the iPhone/iPad.
Sure it may improve it slightly by Apple knowing better what businesses want, but the features will be slapped in by Apple employees that know nothing about security.

[qbnkelt]

LOL!!!! These are all the sales people who were hired to promote the "Apple for corporate" campaign!!! Now we know how Apple's done it, they're the ones behind it all!

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[grncherry1]

Last year Balsillie was stating that nobody wanted an Ipad and turns out it is selling like hotcakes. Now he is playing catch-up again. That is the corp. mentality at RIM. They aren't forward thinking and eventually will be left far behind. At this stage Apple is getting into the enterprise side of things and it won't take them years to develop a product and bring it to market, while RIM sits in the slow lane and thinks about it. As the old saying goes, "If you can't run with the big dogs, keep your *** on the porch".

[Username00089]

This happens plenty in the corporate world. Only time will tell how relevant this person was to RIM. But I do agree that RIM looks like the bf left in the dark here.

[Rootbrian]

Oh well, if they get tired of snapple, they'll move back.

They might inspire them to open up and not lock down customers. Most likely they won't give up their beloved berries.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[WillieLee]

Last year Balsillie was stating that nobody wanted an Ipad and turns out it is selling like hotcakes. Now he is playing catch-up again. That is the corp. mentality at RIM. They aren't forward thinking and eventually will be left far behind. At this stage Apple is getting into the enterprise side of things and it won't take them years to develop a product and bring it to market, while RIM sits in the slow lane and thinks about it. As the old saying goes, "If you can't run with the big dogs, keep your *** on the porch".

Mr. Balsillie never said that no one wanted an iPad.

[johnkey]

Maybe RIM will reciprocate and go after Apple's engineers and development talent.

[WillieLee]

So Apple lured people away with bigger incentives, it happens quite frequently and will happen more now that the illegal practice of not poaching employees that was arranged by Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit and Pixar has been broken up by the US Justice Department.

At the end of the day it's about what you're selling. And RIM's enterprise solution is still years beyond what Apple has to offer. There's no app for covering up a confidential information breach.

[WillieLee]

Maybe RIM will reciprocate and go after Apple's engineers and development talent.

They hired Don Lindsay last year. He was the head of user experience for the first four releases of Mac OS X and then went on to work at Microsoft. Who knew LinkedIn would end up being the source for lazy writers to spin stories of "Big technology news".

[_StephenBB81]

I'd worry if they we in software/hardware development, but they're just salespeople.

Probably to either get a better understanding what enterprise customers want, or (more likely) Jobs thinks that all he needs are RIM's salespeople to convince business to buy Apple products like they buy RIM products.

In other words: I fail to see how this would improve the iPhone/iPad.
Sure it may improve it slightly by Apple knowing better what businesses want, but the features will be slapped in by Apple employees that know nothing about security.

I am more worried about Sales people than Software/Hardware developers,

Apple is proof that Sales and Marketing can turn a mediocre product into the gold standard (ipod first gen)

Major Sales are built on relationships as much as being built on the products, I am sure that these RIM sales people have contacts within company's that are 100% RIM right now, dropping Apple products in and selling on their feature set can swing a company, or at least help apple get some big company's open to the idea of bringing apple in.

RIM hopefully has some quality replacement people, ( if not RIM, I would gladly take over a sales roll ) to replace these guys, and are already starting to continue to build the relationships with their biggest BES customers,

[grahamf]

I am more worried about Sales people than Software/Hardware developers,

Apple is proof that Sales and Marketing can turn a mediocre product into the gold standard (ipod first gen)

Major Sales are built on relationships as much as being built on the products, I am sure that these RIM sales people have contacts within company's that are 100% RIM right now, dropping Apple products in and selling on their feature set can swing a company, or at least help apple get some big company's open to the idea of bringing apple in.

RIM hopefully has some quality replacement people, ( if not RIM, I would gladly take over a sales roll ) to replace these guys, and are already starting to continue to build the relationships with their biggest BES customers,

All the sales people can do is polish a turd.

that's why I'm not worried.
Sure, Apple may sell more, but they're still the exact same thing. And chances are, enterprise customers will run into the limitations of the Apple platform and eventually switch to products that are actually designed for business.

[Totalimmortal363]

Sales is pretty much solely based on polishing a turd. Apples turds or RIM's turds, the right people can talk anyone into pretty much anything.

[CASH]

I haven't seen any evidence to suggest that these were the "best pieces of man power" at RIM.

So why did Apple hire (maybe even poach) them? They may not be the "best pieces of man power" in the literal sense at RIM, but they apparently are when it comes to Enterprise sales.

I'd worry if they we in software/hardware development, but they're just salespeople.

Probably to either get a better understanding what enterprise customers want, or (more likely) Jobs thinks that all he needs are RIM's salespeople to convince business to buy Apple products like they buy RIM products.

In other words: I fail to see how this would improve the iPhone/iPad.
Sure it may improve it slightly by Apple knowing better what businesses want, but the features will be slapped in by Apple employees that know nothing about security.

As much as I love RIM/BlackBerry, Apple totally wins in the software and hardware design departments. I've been using Apple's products since before I hit puberty and have always liked the UI of Macs. But it's just that: the UI. Sure their are other reasons to buy Apple products but mostly it's the look of it. If you don't like Microsoft/Windows, your only other option is a Mac (most consumers don't even know of Ubuntu, Linux etc) and the fact that the software is made by the same guys (company) who made the hardware allows everything to just flow very easily.

Steve hiring them "to get a better understanding of what enterprise customers want, or (more likely) Jobs thinks that all he needs are RIM's salespeople to convince business to buy Apple products like they buy RIM products" completely makes sense. He's now going to be able to get rid of the public stigma that iPads are not for Enterprise b/c they're not secure. The way I see it is that iPads are secure. They may not have encrypted and compressed email/data, but it's secure. Unless of course your servers have no password(s), nothing accesible from your public Wi-Fi, iPad isn't stolen etc. Even if stolen, password protect (maybe even remote wipe/sync via Enterprise software/apps) is an option.

I am more worried about Sales people than Software/Hardware developers,

Apple is proof that Sales and Marketing can turn a mediocre product into the gold standard (ipod first gen)

Major Sales are built on relationships as much as being built on the products, I am sure that these RIM sales people have contacts within company's that are 100% RIM right now, dropping Apple products in and selling on their feature set can swing a company, or at least help apple get some big company's open to the idea of bringing apple in.

RIM hopefully has some quality replacement people, ( if not RIM, I would gladly take over a sales roll ) to replace these guys, and are already starting to continue to build the relationships with their biggest BES customers,

+1

All the sales people can do is polish a turd.

that's why I'm not worried.
Sure, Apple may sell more, but they're still the exact same thing. And chances are, enterprise customers will run into the limitations of the Apple platform and eventually switch to products that are actually designed for business.

Apple's polishing of the turd that is the iPhone is worth $209 Billion. THE IPHONE ITSELF, NOT APPLE INC. So apparently, all you need to do is sell it. Pretty much anything you buy today is a piece of crap compared to what the sales people told you or made you believe.

The iPhone alone is worth more than all but 10 companies in the world - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Tech

[WillieLee]

So why did Apple hire (maybe even poach) them? They may not be the "best pieces of man power" in the literal sense at RIM, but they apparently are when it comes to Enterprise sales.

They have experience in the field and Apple can't hire the man responsible for RIM's enterprise dominance. That being Jim Balsillie who was the one that went from company to company selling them on RIM. It's not like these were the men behind the curtain. The attention these career changes are getting is a little silly.

But it's also important to note that they went from Global Sales to New York. They might have just wanted to stop travelling the globe and took a job closer to home.

Steve hiring them "to get a better understanding of what enterprise customers want, or (more likely) Jobs thinks that all he needs are RIM's salespeople to convince business to buy Apple products like they buy RIM products" completely makes sense. He's now going to be able to get rid of the public stigma that iPads are not for Enterprise b/c they're not secure. The way I see it is that iPads are secure. They may not have encrypted and compressed email/data, but it's secure. Unless of course your servers have no password(s), nothing accesible from your public Wi-Fi, iPad isn't stolen etc. Even if stolen, password protect (maybe even remote wipe/sync via Enterprise software/apps) is an option.

It's not a stigma. Apple's products do not have the same security or control abilities of RIM's BES. Apple needs third-party software to meet most of the requirements of the financial sector(at the cost of killing all the functionality of the iPhone or iPad) and for the higher security requirements they have no solution.

There is enterprise business to be had for sales departments when it comes to the iPad, and they have experience in dealing with enterprise customers but if they were critical members of RIM's team, why would RIM let them go? And if the iPad was equal to the PlayBook when it came to enterprise, why are companies putting in orders and wanting to test a device that isn't released when they could just buy iPads now?

Apple's polishing of the turd that is the iPhone is worth $209 Billion. THE IPHONE ITSELF, NOT APPLE INC. So apparently, all you need to do is sell it. Pretty much anything you buy today is a piece of crap compared to what the sales people told you or made you believe.

The iPhone alone is worth more than all but 10 companies in the world - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Tech

Market capitalization is not actual worth. Trefis likes to make up projections and sliding graphs because it draws attention to their company.