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AT&T to Target iPhone to Enterprise
narramissic writes "AT&T is reportedly preparing to market the iPhone to business users and is scurrying to ensure that its backend enterprise billing and support systems will accommodate the device when it ships. Analysts are baffled by the move. In addition to running an OS X-based operating system, which enterprises may be reluctant to adopt, the iPhone is also expected to have a number of shortcomings for business users, including not having a removable battery and not having buttons, which would make it difficult to dial while driving says Gartner's Ken Dulaney. Avi Greengart, principal analyst for mobile devices at Current Analysis, also thinks the iPhone won't be a good option for enterprise customers because enterprises won't be able to write applications for the phone."
All the iPhone will need to do is:
Connect to a POP / IMAP Email system (it does).
Read PDF files. The image zoom functionality will work fine for reading PDFs.
Then on the backend, the iPhone uses will get a special email account where all Office attachments are automatically converted to a PDF file before being sent to the phone.
Fairly trivial thing to do.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
I think you're exactly right about AT&T wanting to make sure these units are perceived as capable of being *useful*, vs. very expensive "toy phones".
Most business executives I've seen using a PDA phone aren't real concerned about its capabilities as an input device. They can *call* people back if they have something important to communicate back to them. They simply want to remain in touch with what's going on. Their phone needs to be reliable and basically free of crashes/freezes (Cough, Treo, Cough!). It needs to have a relatively easy-to-read display and easy-to-navigate interface, so it's comfortable to read incoming emails on. Ability to view attachments is critical too. Too much data arrives as a PDF file, a Word or Excel document, or a JPG or TIFF image for that not to work quickly and smoothly.
It seems to me like the iPhone could meet all of these requirements with little problem, really. The "status symbol" factor is icing on the cake.
One of the many reasons that Newton failed is the fact that it started out as a way to reinvent how we interact with computers, and then Apple decided to panic when they realised that the project could interfere with Mac sales, so they turned it into a Mac peripheral.
For iPhone, OTOH, Jobs took "Computer" out of the name of the company, so I don't think they are too worried about giving iPhone the room it needs to succeed...
Yeah, that last one was kinda sarcasm and kinda not... most businesses I have worked for want to know
-Can it receive and send text messages easily?
-Does it make phone calls (easily)? (Yep, it is a phone)
-Can it sync with our email system?
-Can it open the occasional document sent to it?
Some businesses want more collaborative features, but the fact is, they are rarely used in most corporate environments. To that end though, with a full featured web browser (as also discussed on /. before), the possibilities are endless there without too much work - and since many companies are web enabling their stuff, most will see no additional work to make their stuff work on an iPhone. The ones that will are those that use MS (or MS partner) Proprietary solutions like Siebel (which though it is quite powerful, outright sucks anyway).
All in all, I think the iPhone may be the next killer phone.
-Correct form factor (ie: smaller and more comfortable to carry than a Treo or most SmartPhones)
-High level of functionality from full web browser to extensibility via widgets and other apps
-Support from a company that is second to none (other than perhaps IBM that they generally rate roughly equal to)
-Stable, proven platform... no hard resets, soft resets
-Synchronizable with Macs and PCs
-Intuitive interface
-shiny!!! (no, not joking on this one... many tech decisions are based on the eye-candy factor even though they shouldnt be).
-Investment protection in having a phone built on a hardware and software platform that will allow tomorrows (and even the next day's) latest apps and widgets to run on it.
Just my 12 cents.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
If you look at the history of those two phone lines, you'll see why iphone doesn't have much of a chance. Blackberries were targeted to the enterprise from day 1. Sidekicks were focused on consumers. Despite high profile users such as Paris Hilton and others, Enterprises didn't ask for the ability to put apps on the sidekick. However, many non enterprise users have adopted the blackberry.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
From the summary: Analysts are baffled by the move.
From a 2001 article on the just-introduced iPod: A big yawner, you say? Perhaps. After all, there are plenty of MP3 players out there. (Compaq Computer (CPQ), for example, offers one for $149.99 on its Web site.) But while Apple's latest debut might not score high on the significance meter -- particularly according to Wall Street analysts hoping for a splashier announcement -- it does offer a glimpse into the tactics computer makers are beginning to employ as demand for their core products wanes. When it comes to Apple, if the analysts can't make heads or tails out of a new product, it's almost certain the product will sell. Usually when you've caught the analysts off-guard, you've moved to an area of consumer savvy marketing that has a life all it's own.
A friend in the EDA industry who has been marketing these tools for twenty years notes that analysts are consistently wrong about the marketability of new products in established markets - he says: "those who can't sell, analyze."
They're baffled? Really?
So you're saying the CEO isn't gonna want one of these things? Please.
Also, you don't write applications that run *on* the iPhone... you write web applications that run in the *browser* that runs on the iPhone.
I can't believe Gartner is this clueless... I think someone at Apple forgot to pay them to gush.
Which won't matter a whit for most businesses out there. "Shiny" will matter.
Full featured web browser.
Your logic is truly dizzying. First, saying that "its new, and thus will have inherent security problems" is a logical fallacy. There will no doubt be bugs, but I haven't seen any evidence that they won't be easily fixable software bugs instead of 'inherent security problems.' Second, while there are certainly companies out there that care about security, very few are likely to think in terms of 'its new, thus security will be a problem.' They will ask if the feature list for security matches up with their requirements and probably leave it at that. Those that care about the stability of the platform will wait, but that has nothing to do with security.
The only question that matters in this regard is: "will it be fast enough." "Something reasonably 'kewl'" does not fit into it.
Considering when it comes out, I am willing to bet on Vista support. iTunes has fairly well understood problems with running on Vista, none of which I can think of will apply to the iPhone. They also have several more months to work on it, and most environments don't seem to be switching to vista anyways.
A lack of Outlook support is more of a problem, but also not guaranteed to be the case. It may also not be that big of a deal: some companies it will matter and in some it will not, and it does promise to sync with the computer.
You are kidding, right?
I would love to see stats on how many people, percentage wise, actually ever change the batter on their phone. How many among business users would also be an interesting stat.
Which matters for most US-based businesses why?
How many viruses are in the wild for OS X?
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Just one comment:
""will it be fast enough.""
Picture something for me.
Picture the clouds opening up, and a booming voice from heaven:
"NO"
EDGE PDAs are disastrously bad. Anyone paying $500 for an EDGE pda with intent to use its internet functionality should get their head examined.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
They were there first. But it sucked. Forget 1GB, you couldn't buy more than 8 or 16MB for any amount of money. You weren't talking about a feature-length movie when WinCE came out, you were talking maybe some really crappy music videos. And then there was battery life... a Palm Pilot of the day would go 3 weeks on a set of AAA batteries, while a WinCE machine could go about 1-3 days before you needed to charge it. A friend of mine had one of these things. He loaded a music video on it and a video of him and his girlfriend. Later he put some MP3s on it when the cost of media came down. It was too big for his pocket, so it basically stayed anchored to his desk, plugged in right next to his PC that could do all of those things better. It was neat, and we liked to play with it - but it was still a silly toy that very few people bought.
To this day, I don't see very many people watching videos on these things. It's just not practical. You can't buy pre-formatted videos for them anywhere (that I know of), and it takes a couple of hours to encode a DVD... which by the way is illegal in the US. Not much of a killer app. Even the iPod's video function is mostly dismissed as a novelty.
So yes, they were first, and their product is now fairly solid, but only MS could have supported such an atrocious failure so long without going bankrupt. A smaller company like Palm had MS's lunch because they were stubborn. By the time the hardware became fast enough that their product was any good, the market stopped growing.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Jobs just after the unveiling, said personally in an interview that the iPhone would be able to run third party apps - but they would be tightly controlled by Apple, there would not be an open SDK. If AT&T and Apple in combination are willing to solicit the construction of some enterprise apps, they could be bought by users and loaded as well.
However much of the need for third-party applications will be removed via the obvious step of the users ability to include Dashboard-like widgets created with Dashcode, something not announced but pretty obvious. If you can load your own custom web snippets, how many actual applications do you really need? Most people buy applications for devices to replace built-in programs that stink, but Apple has been pretty good at delivering good applications with systems that many people actually like using.
The iPhone is going to sneak up on the enterprise just the same way the Blackberry did, by a lot of corporate users owning them and demanding more enterprise support.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley