Apple’s board of directors announced today that Steve Jobs is stepping down as the CEO and COO Tim Cook is stepping up to fill Jobs’ role. Our coverage is here. It’s an end of an era for both Apple and for the technology industry. What will it mean for enterprise technology?

The iPhone and iPad have helped Apple develop a foothold in the enterprise market. In its most recent earnings call, the company claimed that 91% of the Fortune 500 were had deployed or were testing the iPhone and 86% had deployed or were testing the iPad.

But Steve Jobs has been notoriously ambivalent about the enterprise. Apple shut down Xserve, its line of OSX servers, last year. And Jobs He famously said in a D8 conference interview:

What I love about the consumer market that I always hated about the enterprise market is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person votes for themselves. They go yes or no. And if enough of them say yes, we get to come to work tomorrow. You know? That’s how it works. It’s really simple. That’s why in the enterprise market it’s not so simple. The people that use the products don’t decide for themselves. And the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused. We love just trying to make the best product in the world for people, and having them tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether we’re on track or not.

Cook, on the other hand, has played-up Apple’s success in the enterprise with the iPhone and iPad. Apple now has an enterprise sales team, including at last a few former RIM employees. That sounds very much like a Cook initiative. And Cook seems to be serious about courting enterprise customers. He’s talked up Apple’s enterprise traction not just in earnings call, but at other opportunities as well.

Services Angle

Apple is a product company through and through, but starting with the .Mac service and continuing today with the iCloud service, it does have a services component. iCloud will include a Google Docs style document hosting and collaboration tool in the form of a hosted version of the iWork suite, so it’s not out of the question that Apple could have a services presence in the enterprise.

More importantly, however, it is a vendor of the leading slate and one of the leading enterprise smart phones. Cook is unlikely to let its position in this area slip, and will likely focus on selling more Apple products in the enterprise. If Apple isn’t up for providing support and services for these products itself there will be a tremendous opportunity for other companies. Our own John Furrier suggested: “Maybe HP will put Steve on their board and start selling Apple hardware and own the enterprise together.”