Is Apple Readying iPhone for Business? Jobs Hints That It Is
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It's not just consumers who are licking their chops as the iPhone goes on sale. Business users, too, want the multifunctional hand-held device, and Apple CEO Steve Jobs suggests that a corporate version of the iPhone could be ready sooner than later. |
In an interview published Friday, the day Apple began selling the iPhone, Jobs hinted that an announcement about corporate users could come within weeks. "There's already corporations who have been running pilots hooking up to exchange servers and other kinds of mail servers, and they have gone very well," Jobs told The New York Times.
Is the iPhone ready for business? Some experts say not yet.
"The iPhone is--and I can't stress this enough--not an enterprise-class device," Benjamin Gray, analyst for infrastructure and operations with Forrester Research, told eWeek.com, the online site of eWeek magazine, which like CIO Insight, is published by Ziff Davis Media.
David Morgenstern, eWeek executive editor/special projects, noted that Gray didn't deny Apple's innovation and predicted the move will drive enterprise-class device manufacturers to produce more "consumer-friendly smart phones, which will drive the next wave of adoption over the next few years." Yet, June 2007 wasn't the time, Morgenstern wrote.
Gray listed for eWeek what he sees as iPhone's shortfalls as a business tool: lack of support for business e-mail, such as Research In Motion's BlackBerry services and Microsoft Exchange [Microsoft has just released a fix to Exchange 2007 to allow e-mail from iPhones]; lack of third-party applications; a high price tag; and limited support from service providers. "Nor does it come with tools for IT to secure the data on the device through encryption or the ability to remotely lock or wipe a lost or stolen device," he said. "I find it hard to believe that many IT managers will mistake the iPhone for a business device for these reasons."
Yet, many of the arguments against the iPhone could vanish if the device is used to access Web apps, CIO Insight and Baseline editor in chief John McCormick writes in a column to be published in the July issue of Baseline.
"Potential applications are everywhere, including sales, distribution, supply chain, retail and medical," McCormick says. "It's easy to envision the units at the assembly line, the hospital bedside, the loading dock and the boardroom."
Here's a slideshow on how the iPhone stacks up against other multifunction, handheld tools, on the market now or expected to be released shortly.
