Making the iPhone a welcome Enterprise device
Thursday, April 29th, 2010 Barbara Nelson, CTO
Part 2 of 2
On Tuesday, I talked about the iPhone and current features. Now, let’s talk about what’s to come.
The biggest enterprise feature to come in iPhone 4.0 (and the one that Apple has said very little about) is support for enterprise-hosted applications, and wireless application distribution via Wi-Fi or 3G. Apple has even said that this capability will be compatible with 3rd party management frameworks, such as Sybase, via a new Mobile Device Management API.
This is a huge step forward for Apple, as up to now, enterprises have been very limited in their ability to manage the proliferation of applications on to their end user devices. Users could download any application they liked from the app store, and the enterprise had no tools to manage this potential security risk.
So, based on this feature set, what is the next set of enterprise features that we should we expect to see from Apple? Apple is not very good at telling us what they are going to do, in advance of doing it. If any company likes the buzz around surprising all of us, it’s Apple. Entire industries seem to be springing up, whose sole purpose in life is to guess at Apple’s next move.
I don’t claim that my crystal ball is any more accurate than anyone else’s. However, based on what they have done to date, and based on how the enterprises are struggling to manage the consumer devices that are showing up in the office on a Monday morning, Apple’s move towards providing management tools is a good hint on where they are going.
Over the next few months, expect to see Apple build a formidable enterprise management solution, so that they can move from the ‘tolerated’ corporate device to the ‘welcomed’ corporate device. Whether they build this themselves, or partner with the industry leaders in this space remains to be seen, but we can be confident that they will close this gap, and make the iPhone as easy to manage as the other ‘enterprise-friendly’ smart phones.
Apple’s move towards the enterprise is an opportunity and a challenge for enterprises. Enterprises will have new tools to manage their end users, but they will have a growing community of employees demanding connectivity wherever they happen to be. By partnering with iPass, the enterprise can manage the mobility experience for their enterprise users on Apple devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, and now the iPad), balancing the connectivity needs and the costs for their always-connected end users, whether on the ground or in the air.
Tags: Apple, enterprise mobility, iPhone
