It’s time to free the enterprise!

I’m excited that today we announced our partnership with Apple to help our clients transform their enterprise with iOS. This partnership is about accelerating ideas, sharing information, and connecting employees, inventory, supply chains, and customers while using the iOS devices they know and love. This partnership comes at a time when digital is dominating the priorities of business leaders and mobile solutions are poised to transform the entire organization.

In the early days of the internet era, we witnessed a shift from a consumer focus to browser solutions that transformed the way employees work and the way they engaged with core enterprise applications.

Now in 2016, we are seeing the same shift. In the past five years, smartphones have redefined how we live. When Deloitte decided to double-down on digital in 2011, the adoption of iPhone and apps were just getting started. Now, five years later, iPhone and iPad are woven into the fabric of how we live and interact with each other—all day, every day. Online shopping has rapidly shifted to mobile. 57 percent of Black Friday online traffic comes from mobile devices, and 93 percent of Americans reach for their mobile phones soon after waking up.

At the same time, iPhone and iPad are driving enterprise, redefining the way work gets done. Leading organizations are using iOS devices to transform retail store operations, healthcare, restaurants, sales, field maintenance, and dozens of other services and processes. But there are even more opportunities for mobile. There are hundreds of businesses and processes that are still operating under old models, with employees tethered to workstations, point-of-sale devices, or disconnected from real-time information. Our partnership will help drive the consumerization of the enterprise and will free the employees to work in uninhibited ways – ultimately delivering productivity and value back to the business.

To support this market opportunity, we’ve established a new Apple practice with 5,000 trained iOS specialists, including developers, architects, designers, industry specialists, and strategists. This team will lead accelerator workshops, help clients identify areas of opportunity using industry-specific value maps for iOS, and create best practices for enterprise iOS mobile solutions.

We’re also working with Apple to launch a new offering called EnterpriseNext—a set of tools and workshops designed to accelerate the process of ideation, prototyping, and evaluating mobile opportunities for iPhone and iPad. These two-week workshops—held in our studios, Greenhouses, and Apple’s Enterprise Design Lab—will generate innovative ideas by combining the creative thinking of industry experts, iOS app developers, enterprise architects, and business leaders in an immersive environment, and take these ideas from prototype to customized, native iOS solutions.

After creating customer-specific prototypes in an EnterpriseNext Workshop for iOS, industry experts and technical teams will collaborate to develop solutions and accelerate deployment of custom-designed iOS applications and tools that bring the power of back-office ERP, CRM, analytics, and HR platforms to the employee anytime, anywhere.

We’re excited to announce this important partnership as we continue on our own journey to help clients transform their business models for the digital era centered on the iOS platform. Teaming up with the leading mobile experience company will help our clients realize their ambitions quickly and with the greatest impact on their businesses.

To learn more about our new partnership with Apple visit www.deloitte.com/apple.

Mike Brinker is a digital pioneer. His deep insights and experience across industry, technology, and creative marketing help organizations reimagine their business and disrupt their competitors. In his 20-plus years at Deloitte, Mike has incubated numerous technology practices, led major acquisitions, joint ventures, alliances, built Deloitte’s India technology practice, and was a instrumental at launching Deloitte Digital. He has served dozens of clients in the retail, hospitality, technology, and media sectors.