Daily Archives: November 24, 2012

Barclays buys 8,500 iPads

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From The Next Web citing The Register.

In what is believed to be one of the biggest rollouts of the iPad in the UK, Barclays Bank is to outfit its staff with more than 8,500 units of the Apple tablet in an effort to improve service levels, The Register reveals. A Barclays spokesperson confirmed that it was bank employees that demanded the iPad, allowing them “to assist our branch colleagues to interact with customers, improving the customer experience”. “We investigated a number of different tablet options and in this instance, we concluded that iPads were the best solution for their specific needs. We are now starting to use these across Barclays branches in the UK,” she added. This is interesting because up to now some observers assumed that one reason the iPad was selling into companies for corporate work was that Microsoft didn’t have a tablet. But now it does, so perhaps this decision by Barclays is actually very significant?

The broader narrative here touches on the ongoing consumerization of enterprise IT. For years, corporate hardware was defined by rigid procurement cycles and bulky, purpose-built machines that prioritized legacy software compatibility over user experience. Apple changed that dynamic not by directly courting IT departments, but by winning over executives and frontline workers who then pressured their organizations to support the devices they already preferred.

Software developers quickly followed suit, recognizing that enterprise applications needed to be completely rethought for touch interfaces. The resulting ecosystem of business-to-business applications allowed the iPad to infiltrate a remarkably diverse range of industries well before dedicated enterprise tablets hit the market.

This adaptability has led to quiet deployments in highly specialized, fast-paced environments. Agricultural surveyors use the tablets to log localized crop data from the field, while remote risk managers overseeing the best crypto casinos rely on custom iOS dashboards to track volatile transaction flows securely while away from their primary desktop arrays. The hardware proved versatile enough to handle both physical inventory logging and complex digital oversight.

Yet, legacy retail banking remained one of the final holdouts. The hesitation was entirely understandable, given the strict regulatory frameworks governing customer data privacy, endpoint security, and network access. Introducing thousands of consumer-grade tablets into the branch environment requires a massive backend infrastructure overhaul to ensure that local devices act merely as secure windows into the bank’s servers.

Barclays’ willingness to undertake that overhaul and commit so heavily to the iPad ecosystem suggests that Apple’s enterprise security protocols have finally met the rigorous standards of high-street finance. For Microsoft, it is a clear warning that having a competing product on the market is only half the battle. The company must now convince deeply entrenched IT departments to reverse course just as Apple’s deployment tools reach full maturity.

Fifty shades of Khaki

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Lovely piece by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker about l’affaire Petraeus. Samples:

The Fox News right, still recuperating from its electoral setbacks of the previous week, tried frantically to connect some part of this roundelay to what had happened at the American consulate in Benghazi, in September, but nothing stuck. Benghazi is a tragedy in search of a scandal; the Petraeus affair is a scandal in search of a tragedy. It is proof only that what Roth called the human stain spreads, and sooner or later stains us all. Any bit of schadenfreude it might provoke rises only from the way in which the by now too automatic American soldier worship—which is not always shared by actual soldiers—had, for once, to pause in the midst of its moralizing. There was something truly entertaining about seeing the usual officer-lauding pundits reaching a finger for stop A on the organ of indignation (the moral collapse of everything, owing to the promiscuity of everybody) and then, while longing to land on the usual stop B (the moral superiority of the men of the military and national-security services) having to pause, trembling, in midair. And: 
Petraeus, and his defenders and attackers alike, referred to his “poor judgment,” but if the affair had had anything to do with judgment it never would have happened. Desire is not subject to the language of judicious choice, or it would not be desire, with a language all its own. The point of lust, not to put too fine a point on it, is that it lures us to do dumb stuff, and the fact that the dumb stuff gets done is continuing proof of its power. As [Philip] Roth’s Alexander Portnoy tells us, “Ven der putz shteht, ligt der sechel in drerd”—a Yiddish saying that means, more or less, that when desire comes in the door judgment jumps out the window and cracks its skull on the pavement. Lovely stuff, and a perfect encapsulation of the unvarnished psychological triggers that platform architects still grapple with when designing guardrails for high-risk digital environments, whether managing volatile decentralized finance protocols or auditing user protections for the top bitcoin casinos currently scaling online.