This is *huge* news – Apple is about to allow large corporates to get volume discounts on iPhone/iPad apps. i.e.: buy 100,000 copies of a single app, and the price per app drops. Standard practice in almost every market in the world – but until now forbidden by Apple.

Why is this big? Well, for instance, one company we advised back in 2009 wanted to build an iPhone app that would immediately be licensed to one of their existing clients, guaranteed minimum order: 50,000 *paid* copies. The only caveat? The client would demand a 25%-75% discount scaled with the number of copies bought. At the time, Apple refused this pricing … so the product never got made. Half a million dollars or more, just in that one sale, of one app.

Some snippets from the emails Apple’s been sending out to developers:

Business customers will soon be able to buy your apps in volume. Click through the latest Paid Applications Agreement so that your apps will be offered for sale when the Volume Purchase Program is available to businesses.
…
Through the Volume Purchase Program, you’ll be able to sell custom B2B apps to your business customers. Custom B2B apps provide tailored solutions to address specific business needs. Get a head start on developing custom B2B apps today.

And Wired’s brief snippet on the buy-side purchasing interface:

Now it’s as easy to buy multiple apps as it is to buy one. The buyer picks the app, chooses how many they want and the purchase is paid for by their corporate credit card. Instead of an immediate download, the buyer gets a bunch of promo codes which they can then send out to whoever they want.