What is Apple Business? New platform for businesses

Apple has just announced Apple Business, an all-new platform designed for businesses. Crucially, it consolidates several of Apple’s previous business offerings, such as Apple Business Essentials and Apple Business Manager, under a single platform.

At a high level, the new platform gives businesses the ability to manage devices, employee communications, and customer engagement. An administrator can now easily do all of this using a single service, as opposed to having to hop around different services, as was the case in the past.

Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of Enterprise and Education Marketing, said:

At the heart of Apple Business is a feature called Blueprints that, according to Apple, allows businesses to “easily set up devices with preconfigured settings and apps, ensuring consistency and security and enabling zero-touch deployment for employees, so that new Apple products are ready to go out of the box”. 

Employees with devices enrolled under Apple Business will see an Apple Business companion app on their devices, which will allow them to install apps for work, find colleague contact details, and request support.

Finally, Apple Business also contains brand management tools to help businesses set up and manage how their brand and locations appear across Apple’s various apps and services, such as in emails to customers, payment portals, and place cards on Apple Maps. 

Apple Business will also give its users insights into customer interactions. For example, in the case of place cards on Apple Maps, it could tell users how customers are using them. Are they looking at place cards to find directions, check opening hours, or find promotions?

Ultimately, the goal of Apple Business is to help businesses integrate Apple devices as seamlessly and painlessly as possible into their organisations and workflows. The platform is highly scalable and can be deployed by small businesses and large corporations alike.

Apple Business is free to use and will be available starting 14 April in Singapore and over 200 more countries.

You can learn more about Apple Business here.