What Fred Anderson isn’t telling

As you may know, we’ve long been fans of Job’s iServices initiative (see here, when they hadn’t yet been announced, and here when we learned the ancestry and history of them). Originated as a way of finding a job for NeXT’s professional services employees, it is in fact a prime occasion for Apple to reap serious consulting profits while promoting its technologies.

When it was publicly presented, iServices was said to be an almost US-and-Canada only operation, with a little apartment in Paris.

Branching out fast

As we comment elsewhere today, Apple’s Fred Anderson has just been commenting on the company’s prospects and strategy. But he’s completely sidelined the developments in the training and consulting division.

NeXT’s offspring is extending its European operations from its Paris headquarters: already a London unit is in operation and servicing the UK and Ireland. That was known.

Now we’ve just learned (won’t quote sources) that Apple’s set up shop in Germany, followed closely by a new Italian unit that is still recruiting but can already claim some customers’ scalps.

We also have found out that they have been working in Spain (doing a training for an integrator company), where the company denies any plans for a homegrown subsidiary and admits only to certification exams and some basic training. The same is true for most other European countries –but here our sources are indirect, so we could be wrong and wouldn’t be surprised-.

But that’s not all: Asia is also getting it’s own iServices group, which will doubtless become very important. We couldn’t find out about Latin America, and there doesn’t seem to be one in Australia or Africa or the Middle East... yet.

This is serious

In these times even Carly Fiorina’s HP is buying as much consulting services as it can (you don’t think Compaq’s got any other jewel in its crown, now do you?) to join the high-margin survivors of these “recession”. Nobody believes in making a living by cranking out hardware, and everyone’s turning to billing customers for helping them use it.

This is also the case for advanced business software vendors: consulting makes up more than half of the bill for any serious high-end developer’s products.

Apple’s sitting pretty with its software-based business, but it can seriously enhance its results by offering a product-based, quality consulting service. Not only that, but it needs to do so if it wants to be perceived as a serious business software vender... which it wants to be.

Why keep it up its sleeve?

So why is Apple keeping this initiative almost under wraps? Why not trumpet it out loud, and explain the roll-out program?

Investors would love it. Companies would be more confident when adopting their technology. And I’d send in a resumé just in case :-).

More Macuarium articles in English

http://www.macuarium.com/macuarium/actual/gb/gbindex.htm