The role of partners in Apple Inc.’s enterprise strategy has become a lot more pronounced over recent years. Today, the mobile giant doubled down by announcing a collaboration with Accenture PLC that will focus on helping organizations build custom iOS apps.

The partnership has several dimensions. First, Accenture is set to form iOS development teams at key offices that will be co-located with personnel from Apple. Besides the usual mix of developers and designers, the mobile giant also plans to send subject-matter experts such as data scientists who are familiar with the more specialized aspects of large software projects.

Accenture senior manager Gene Reznik told Reuters that the first such joint group will be based in San Francisco, but didn’t specify how many teams will be formed. Fortunately, Apple’s partnership announcement provided more details.

The companies intend to offer enterprises assistance with every major aspect of mobile development from app prototyping to maintenance. The partnership will draw upon Accenture’s system integration know-how, which will be channeled into helping companies connect their iOS apps to back-end business applications.

Another goal of the collaboration is enabling the enterprise to link their apps with newer platforms, namely connected devices. To that end, Accenture will work with Apple to build “tools, templates and pre-designed code” for addressing the task. This part of the partnership seems to focus on organizations that wish to handle part of the development lifecycle in-house. 

It’s certainly something that Apple and Accenture would do well to address. In an interview with TechCrunch, Apple executive Susan Prescott noted that the number of in-house iOS developers employed by companies doubled over the past three years. Adding integration with connected devices can be difficult, which gives enterprises an incentive to outsource the task to a more experienced provider.

Completing the list of priorities for the partnership is assisting companies with the migration of existing applications to iOS. It wasn’t specified what platforms those applications will be migrated from, but Android is likely a top target.

Apple’s new alliance with Accenture comes as Google Inc. also looks to widen the adoption of its devices in the enterprise. Last week, the search giant introduced a new Chrome OS bundle for businesses that offer security and automation features designed to ease the management of employee Chromebooks.

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