As Apple continues to win over everyday consumers with their iPhones, many have expressed concern on their ability to convince large capital companies to drop their Blackberries and run to the nearest Apple store on July 11th to pick up 200,000 3G handsets to replace their entire company’s current system. What are the biggest issues Apple is facing in order to perfect the ideal corporate iPhone? No longer is it in the design, speed, or price. According the Computerworld.com, the problems are now focused around control, security and large scale application distribution.
As Computerworld.com stated in a recent article (New iPhone Still Faces Corporate Disconnect), “Apple still has both hardware and software issues to work through before the iPhone is likely to be widely adopted in corporate environments.” The author cited the biggest issues being the application installation process for large companies. With iTunes (a “decidedly consumer-oriented piece of software”) being the direct approach for distribution for custom applications, companies will have to obtain digital certificates from Apple and transmit the applications to Macs and PCs running iTunes. Individual iPhones will have to be connected via cable to an desktop running iTunes in order to synch with the software and get access to available applications.
Chiquita Brands International, Inc. expressed their concern over the amount of control Apple would hold over their IT operations. While Chiquita currently utilizes iPhone rival Blackberry (with no current plans to switch over), they site their main reasons to stick with the familiar are their adversity to being locked in to a plan with AT&T and to distribute their applications via iTunes. Other general corporate complaints include battery replacement issues (mail in device), lack of defined corporate technical support, and security management issues.
This is not to say that Apple isn’t moving in the right direction. By lowering the price in the 3G iPhone, they have certainly gained more corporate attention. Apple has also adopted the use of Cisco Systems to vamp up security. Will Apple venture away from the consumer based iTunes as their main iPhone software in order to accommodate large companies? That is yet to be seen. But if Apple wants to truly have a large piece of the smart-phone pie, they are not only going to have to listen to the harping of the twenty something masses, but the complaints and expertise of the everyday CEO and their corporate partners.
Additional thoughts: iTunes completely seems out of place in the corporate market. Yes, the application may fit perfectly into Apple’s ecosystem while syncing all of a persons digital devices. But, in the corporate world, iTunes (or a scaled back version of iTunes) seems completely out of place. Apple can’t hope to win over the corporate world by treating this aspect of the deal with little attention. They need to focus on the software that will be used inside of a corporation while making it a breeze to rapidly deploy. Once Apple hits the corporate market with a piece of software that can sync and work like iTunes (only without all the media and more security), iPhone integration into large corporations will be much simpler, thus gaining Apple larger market share and penetration into corporations.
3 Comments to “3G iPhone not enough for corporate market. iTunes seems out of place.”
Yes, iTunes is too easy to use in a corporate environment. Apple MUST come out with a command-line tool, with at least 27 different parameters, all of which are required, for the iPhone to be at all useful in business. Apple should know by now that I.T. HATES everything that connects together and just works. If it doesn’t takes hours or days to tweak and configure, it’s obviously too simple to be a useful tool.
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It’s so true. I.T. simply doesn’t want or know how to handle things that want to work “out-of-the-box”. It’s in their job description to fix things that are broken, so if Apple provides a solution that simply works, IT jobs might get cut in half as well. It’s definitely something to think about. If anything, Apple could really setup some nice courses to offer quick certification to IT Specialists that have been using Windows their entire lives. If Apple does it right, they can definitely setup an entire shift and acceptance for themselves in the corporate market.
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itunes = security issues & licensing issues.
PS: I am an apple fan and have an iphone, appletv and a mac. but Itunes is dangerous.
If you were in charge of IT systems and had to account for every piece of software on every corporate system would you allow it?
Media licesing is a dark area, I certainly do not fancy the thought of being locked up for several months and a hefty fine (as the law is allowed to for illegal material on corporate systems) due to some idiot user wating to play their personal illegal mp3’s…
If you want to dowload mp3’s and other media do it at home!
Posters above need to get out more and see the bigger picture.
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