Global CIO: Top 10 Reasons Steve Jobs & Apple Are The Future Of ITGlobal CIO: Top 10 Reasons Steve Jobs & Apple Are The Future Of IT

In the same quarter that customers were soaking up 3.3 million iPads, Apple sold a record number of Mac computers. So not only is there no cannibalization going on, but the products seem to feed off each other.

4) The Mac fan base is growing—rapidly. During the earnings call, CFO Peter Oppenheimer offered this comment on who's buying all those Macs: "About half the Macs sold in our stores during the June quarter were to customers who have never owned a Mac before." Still think it's just for the zealots?

5) Apple's awakening to the enterprise market. On top of Cook's comments above about the stunning uptake for the iPad among many of the largest businesses in the world, Apple's iOS is also making a huge impact in the business world and Apple is responding to that. Here's a comment from CFO Oppenheimer from the call: "During the quarter, we surpassed cumulative sales of 100 million iOS devices. Response to the iOS 4, since its June 21 launch, has been very favorable with customers and reviewers praising its many new features including multitasking, folders, enhanced mail and deeper enterprise support." That's my emphasis on those last three words, and in case you didn't see it, let me repeat: deeper enterprise support.

6) Creating new markets and new followers. As more and more commerce and transactions are done online, more people will be relying on their iPhones and iPads as the engines behind that commerce and those transactions. Can your company optimize your chances for creating the best possible experience for those many millions of customers if your company bans or discourages or doesn't support iPads and iPhones? And if you think this is just a fad, here's Cook responding to an analysts' question about how big the iPad market could be: "We honestly don't know the answer. We have been pleasantly surprised at how fast this product has gotten out of the chute. If you look at how long it took us to sell the first million iPods, the 20-plus months versus the one month of iPad, it is just a phenomenal difference. It is not following a typical early adoptive curve, and then, you know, taking a long time to cross into the mainstream. And so I don't know how high it is. Our guts tell us that this market is very big, and we believe that iPad is really defining the market. And we want to take full advantage of it and so we're investing enormous time and resource in increasing our capability and getting iPad out to as many people as we can."

7) The iPad is no fad. Here's Cook again trying to get his arms around the scope of the opportunity: ". . . we are absolutely selling every unit that we can make, and it looks good in every country that we have launched in so far, and we are excited about launching in additional countries this coming week. And anecdotally it does seem to me that it is beyond an early adopter stage, already as I indicated earlier, just based on watching the people that are using it. And so, it is the fastest that that has happened in any product I know of, or have ever been involved with. So, I think it is extremely unique and extremely special."

Outside of the Apple world, here are three more points from hard-core, mainstream enterprise-IT companies that directly or indirectly buttress my argument that CIOs must—not should, but must--become hair-on-fire lunatics about tying their businesses into the Apple phenomenon.

8) VMware's new view of the "desktop." VMware is altering the desktop segment of its strategy away from managing devices and toward giving workers optimal access to the tools and information they need to do their jobs. Driven largely by the massive success of the iPhone, this strategy shift at VMware has been strongly underscored by the iPad phenomenon. And certainly other mainstream IT vendors are seeing it as well—so the question is, are you? And if not, what are you waiting for?

9) SAP's iPhone-driven strategies. SAP, one of the most enterprise-IT-centric companies in the world, is basing huge chunks of its new-product strategies around the concept of a business world stuffed with iPhones and iPads. As with VMware, we're not talking about some fringe players here: these are two very different companies, yet they're both convinced that they need to act assertively now to be able to exploit in the near future the mega-impact of the iPad and ongoing power of the iPhone.

10) Apple's not done creating magic. From the Wall Street Journal's coverage of Apple's blowout quarter: "Chief Executive Steve Jobs in a press release touted the results as 'phenomenal' and promised that Apple had 'amazing new products still to come this year.' "

The old saw used to be that no one ever got fired for buying IBM. But in the very near future, some CIOs might start to get fired for not buying Apple.

RECOMMENDED READING: Global CIO: An Open Letter To Apple CEO Steve Jobs Global CIO: Is Steve Jobs Blowing Smoke About Apple TV? Global CIO: Cutting Google And Apple Down To Size Global CIO: What Is Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's #1 Competitive Statistic? Global CIO: Apple's Steve Jobs Torpedoes Another Stale Business Model Global CIO: Google Derangement Syndrome Erupts Worldwide Global CIO: Will Steve Jobs Ban Google From AppleWorld? Global CIO: iPhone Users Stupid And Steve Jobs Greedy, Says WSJ Global CIO: Why Apple's iPad Will Be A Great Business Device Global CIO: Steve Jobs' Next Billion-Dollar Business: The Enterprise Mobility iCloud Bob Evans is senior VP and director of information's Global CIO unit.

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