[NewsPoster]

Apple has hired on a former HP executive, John Solomon, to help with enterprise sales, sources say. The people note that his exact position and duties are unclear, but the hiring is said to be core to the company's newfound rush to reach enterprise customers. Solomon may also allegedly be involved in international Apple Watch sales -- specifically in the Asia-Pacific market -- but some of the sources say this is unlikely.

HP has confirmed Solomon's departure, and Apple has confirmed the hiring, but the latter has declined to say what the new job entails. While at HP, Solomon rose through the ranks to become the senior VP of the company's printing and personal systems group.

For years, the enterprise market was a secondary concern for Apple; the iPhone maker even lacked a dedicated enterprise sales team, leaving that up to third parties. In 2014, however, it began to hire along those lines, and even collaborated with IBM on a series of iOS apps and enterprise selling and service. The company has become dominant in mobile sector of the enterprise world, even if desktops and laptops are still largely on Windows.

[The Vicar]

"Enterprise sales"? Presumably, that means convincing businesses that they should buy Macs instead of Windows for their desktops, but that's an extremely hard sell. Apple no longer has server hardware of its own, and its server OS is really just a somewhat mediocre service package running on top of their desktop OS. For individual users, Macs are great because they are the only hardware which can run Mac OS, Windows, and Linux without having to spend a lot of time tricking everything into working properly, but for a business owner the logic works in reverse: Macs will only really work properly with Mac and Linux servers (and Mac servers are practically nonexistent), while Windows will work with Windows and Linux servers. When Apple killed the XServe they shot themselves in the foot.

[shawnde]

@The Vicar .... I completely agree. Enterprise sales for what? Apple KILLED all their enterprise products .... there is nothing to sell. The only thing I can think of, would be iPhone and iPad. I highly doubt they're interested in desktop sales to the enterprise.