Apple Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. are putting aside a rivalry started at the dawn of the personal-computing era to get more businesses to embrace iPhones and iPads.
The deal unveiled yesterday gives Apple access to an IBM sales force that will recommend Apple's devices to customers in industries such as health care and banking, which have never been priorities for the consumer-focused iPhone maker. IBM gets a boost in a long-running effort to sell software and services to companies seeking to manage workers' smartphones and tablets.
"We really recognized almost simultaneously that we could be uniquely helpful to one another's strategy and that there was literally no overlap," Bridget Van Kralingen, IBM's senior vice president of global business services, said in an interview.
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