Analysis: The iPhone moves into the enterprise
With Thursday's announcements, Apple adds what IT's been missing by John C. Welch Mar 6, 2008 5:16 pm
I spent Thursday about 1,800 miles away from Apple's briefing on its iPhone plans for the enterprise, so my impressions are based entirely upon live coverage of the event itself. Keeping that in mind, I think Apple nailed this one. Just nailed it. Apple answered pretty much every question that IT had, and in the way we wanted it answered.
First, a quick rundown of what got announced-Apple is adding support for push e-mail, contacts, and calendaring, which should finally allow Apple's phone to talk to Apple's server. For shops moving to Mac OS X 10.5 Server, this is important. Apple is also promising more support for more VPN types, including Cisco-huge in the IT world-as well as support for two-factor authentication (although there were no real details on this Thursday). Certificate and identity support, also announced though with no details, is big, assuming Apple does it right. The promise of better Wi-Fi security support is always a bonus in the business world. Along with that, Apple is going to offer tools to both enforce security policy, and configure multiple devices for deployment.
I expected most of that, which is why I included those items in my predictions for Thursday's event. In fact, during the first five minutes of the briefing, Apple hit numbers 1, 3, 6, and most of number 2 from my list.
Then Apple announced something I hadn't expected-it licensed Microsoft's ActiveSync for the iPhone. So in addition to push e-mail/contacts/calendaring, you'll get a direct connections to Exchange. Apple's Phil Schiller even did a little demo to show it in action. This is huge, not only for ActiveSync, but because Apple did it. This should give IT executives more confidence in adding iPhones to their Exchange network than ActiveSync from a third party would. (It's not that someone else couldn't do it better-it's that Apple doing it is better from the IT POV.) Besides fulfilling a big request from the IT crowd, it also gave Apple a chance to get in some digs at RIM for the BlackBerry outages by pointing out that an Exchange-phone is a simpler, and in theory, more reliable system than Exchange-BlackBerry Enterprise Server-phone connection.
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