Apple in the Enterprise – Digital CxO Podcast EP103

Hello and welcome to the digital CXO podcast. I'm Amanda Ani, and with me today I have Weldon Dodd. He is the Senior Vice President of Global Partnerships at Con G.

How are you doing today? I'm tuned. Really great.

Thanks so much for having me on, Amanda. Happy to have you on the show. So first, can you share a little bit about Kanji?

What services do you provide? So Kanji is a SaaS solution for companies to manage and secure their Apple devices. So we leverage Apple's mobile device management or MDM Protocol, uh, as well as endpoint security framework and other controls, right, that allow companies to quickly deploy devices out to users that are correctly configured, have the right software and applications installed, patched up to date, secured right controls to hit, um, security frameworks or baselines that they want to achieve.

All of that's, uh, possible with kgi. Great. And to that note, I believe you just released your third Apple Enterprise survey.

So can you share a little bit about what does that survey cover and, uh, what type of people did you survey and the radius of the survey and that kind of thing? Sure, yeah. So this, um, survey is done with in partnership with a research company so that we can guarantee that it's, you know, statistically valid results and, uh, a broad section of IT professionals, mostly North America, but there is international representation in the data as well.

Um, pulling them about their attitudes around Apple devices within the enterprise. Uh, what are they seeing, what, uh, does adoption look like? Is it growing?

Um, what concerns do they have? What are their areas of focus? And so, um, the research firm that we work with, they go out and, and survey all these people and gather the results.

And there's some really, you know, kind of interesting trends that come out of this that indicate that Apple within the enterprise is very strong and continues to grow. Grow. Okay, wonderful.

So what did you see as far as, is there a growing amount of Apple users and, and exactly why is that? Yeah, so there's a clear preference for companies that, uh, about 77% of the respondents say that the Apple footprint within their organization is going to grow in the coming year. Um, that's really being led by two key trends.

One is employee preference. So in organizations where, uh, companies have allowed employees to choose which platform they would like to use for day-to-day productivity, um, apple is continuing to grow. Um, the other key factor is, and security and reliability.

So companies recognize that, uh, apple has some advantages in that area, and so they continue to prefer Apple and they choose to grow the amount of Apple devices they have because they see those advantages around security. And the reliability, I think implied in that is performance as well. Uh, we've seen such massive increases with Apple silicon, uh, particularly the performance of the new M four series chips that have just come out in the new MacBook Pros.

Um, those have real benefits to business, particularly those that are interested in anything related to ai, um, because they're mobile chips, right? That really high performance coupled with strong battery life on a laptop makes for a pretty compelling device a lot of people are interested in using. Yeah, I, for one, have always felt drawn to Apple products.

I feel more comfortable using my Apple phone. I feel it's more secure. I don't have to have any security software on there or anything like that.

And knock on wood, I've never had an outage, which I know your, your survey said that they are confident that there's gonna be less outages with their Apple products. Yeah, there's been some items in the news recently, you know, without, um, being too specific to, to throw shade on anyone specifically. I, there, there are some challenges in the, the Windows environment.

Like I used to work with Microsoft as well, right? So there's no, uh, ill will or bad blood here or anything, right? Um, the, the Windows PC ecosystem is rich and vibrant in lots of different ways, lots of innovation because of its open architecture and kind of the open ecosystem that exists over there.

But that's also one of the challenges, right? That, um, on the PC side, you have to support a wider variety of device drivers for hardware. Um, there's other drivers related to security products, for example, that have low level access to the kernel and operate, you know, within a ring, uh, within of the operating system where it could crash the whole system or not allow it to boot.

And Apple has been able to make a lot of progress in promoting new technologies like system extensions, which are an alternative to, um, an older technology of kernel extensions that are much safer. So system extensions, uh, there's better APIs that Apple's provided around interacting with low level system components so that a failure in a third party component won't necessarily bring down the whole system or prevent it from booting. And so that I think is what this survey result is pointing towards is that because of those improvements that Apple has made, people feel confident they're not gonna face that kind of outage.

And of course the biggest topic of the year is ai. So I'm sure you had some survey questions related to ai. What were your findings there?

Yeah, uh, I mean, uh, an overwhelming number of the IT professionals that responded say that AI is important to the future of their companies, you know, 90 something percent, right? Um, I think it's going to impact, uh, you know, privacy issues. Um, some data governance issues, uh, that seems to be on the mind of most folks is that they see the potential for productivity gains for information workers to leverage AI to quickly do tasks like sort through a huge amount of data and summarize it, you know, tabulate it, uh, provide answers.

There's some interesting possibilities with generative ai, you know, to help out with a few things, uh, creating summaries of reports and whatnot. But this ability to take a lot of data and generate interesting insights or summaries very quickly, uh, is a, a huge potential productivity gain. However, companies need to be concerned about where is their data going, particularly if it relates to customers.

So if they have customer data, right, it's very tempting. It, the opportunity is right there to feed all of this customer data to, uh, large language model or to use like rag uh, procedures or the uh, uh, retrieval augmented generation, right, to get really nice results. But if the terms of use with that AI provider say that they get to include whatever you submit into training their model and improve, well now you've just leaked your, all of your customer data into a model that might be reused elsewhere.

Um, so the, these are the kinds of things that are on the minds of professionals today around ai. Yeah. And of course, uh, we must note that probably AI is gonna be in almost everything moving forward, it's going to be what doesn't have AI in it.

Yeah. So what are your, maybe some predictions you have about the future of these products in the coming year? For, for our space, you know, particularly around, um, security for devices, there's a huge opportunity to use AI for, uh, behavior-based analysis and anomaly detection.

So because we have this ability to build a huge corpus of data around what normal looks like for a device, um, you can train a AI model or a large language model to recognize what is, what's different or what's anomalous. And so for security, this is really exciting because we would love to, um, provide tools and systems and functionality for our customers so they can say, Hey, you know what, this pattern of behavior looks like an attack, um, and we should pay more attention to this device. We should investigate.

Uh, if we can automatically detect that, say in the middle of the night, um, when fewer people might be around to take a look at it and take some action to quarantine that device or restrict access to sensitive materials, we have the possibility of using automation to reduce the potential impact to the organization, right? Reduce the risk level for them. Um, so yeah, it's, it's, it's really exciting.

I, I AI is going to be in everything. Um, some of those applications are, uh, a bit frivolous. I think at times we've seen a few that are, but there are real applications where AI is gonna make, uh, just an enormous difference in our ability to create tools that make teams more productive, that allow them to do more, to get more reach and leverage out of the great people that they already have.

Absolutely. It will be very interesting to see all the use cases for AI over the next couple of years. Yeah.

Well, if you had one key takeaway you could give our audience today, what would that be? Um, I think that, you know, with this survey, right, it's really pointed at, uh, organizations continuing to adopt Apple, to use Apple, uh, you know, in important ways within the org. I think it's a combination of this perception, uh, that Apple is very straightforward to use, that it creates a nice user experience that focus on the endpoint, right?

And making sure that it's productive. That's a, a real trend for the future. Like we've seen this pendulum swaying between computing in the cloud and computing on servers and computing on the endpoint.

Um, Apple's hit this really nice moment where the capabilities on device for doing AI processing combined with the cloud makes for a nice interaction. What I mean by that is when we're thinking about data governance, the more jobs that you can do on device without shipping them out to a third party cloud provider gives you more control over data governance and more, uh, just security in a sense of feeling more, um, confident that you know where your data is and that you have your hands on it. And, and so I think Apple's advantage, particularly with the M four generation of chips and the AI capabilities that are in there for doing this kind of work means that, uh, a lot of companies will see a real tangible benefit to using Apple laptops and being able to do a lot of this AI work on device.

Yeah. Alright, well, thank you so much for coming on our show and sharing your insights with us today about the survey and the future of AI and Apple products. Thank you so much for having me on.

All right. And thank you to our audience. Stay tuned.

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