Believe it or not, CEOs still tell their I.T. managers to let them use whatever device they fancy, regardless of company standards for security and device management.
Works for Apple Inc., which may well have chosen that path to get its foot in the corporate door with its iPhone 3G.
“The best phone for business. Ever,” Apple confidently declares on its Web site.
Four heavy corporate hitters also give their testimony.
“Apple has (addressed) issues of security, manageability and integration,” declares Randy Brooks, a senior VP of I.T. at Disney Corp.
“The iPhone … has shown its potential to be the most useful business mobility tool we’ve ever used,” declares Todd Pierce, CIO at Genentech Inc.
That’s a lot of declarations, which can be parsed. Jobs is said to be the single largest individual shareholder at Disney and a member of the company’s board, and the Genentech CIO carefully referred only to the device’s “potential.”
Hold your iHorses
In contrast, three leading analysts said it just ain’t so – yet.
Corporate I.T. support is limited to a narrow set of applications, such as voice, e-mail, personal information manager (PIM) and browsing, according to Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney.
Yes, as Apple proclaimed, the iPhone 3G and its 2.0 software include Microsoft Corp.’s Exchange’s ActiveSync for push e-mail and PIM functions and Cisco Corp.’s virtual private network (VPN) for access to corporate data.
But the device “isn’t there yet,” Dulaney said, for the heart of the enterprise segment. Financial and legal firms, government, insurance and health-care businesses are legally required to meet high standards for security and an audit trail that demonstrates that confidential data is adequately protected.
To address those concerns, “Apple will have to allow deeper access through the software development kit,” Dulaney said. “They have to expose a multiprocessing feature, to allow background tasks to run, allowing I.T. managers to watch for malicious events.”
“Right now, it’s a very rudimentary implementation,” Dulaney said. “There’s a lot more (computing) power that’s not exposed. Apple’s OS 10 is a powerful, mature operating system. But they’ve shut off a lot of features due to fears over how it runs on this mobile platform. They’ve got to expose more of that power. A lot of the interest from legitimate (device management, security and business application) firms will only help with the maturity of the operating system.”
Carrier to blame?
Kitty Weldon, enterprise mobility analyst at Current Analysis, agreed with Dulaney.
“The problem is, Apple kind of thwarted the level at which third-parties can delve into APIs that deal with device management,” Weldon said. “So we’re in a frozen state until Apple releases its next SDK. Even Sybase, which earlier on prided itself on providing support for the iPhone, could only do so much – such as data encryption for the application they developed. But they couldn’t do it for the entire device.”
Jack Gold, of J. Gold Associates, pointed out that Apple’s exclusive deal with AT&T Mobility also limits corporate options.
“The iPhone still fails to meet some fundamental enterprise-centric requirements that many of its competitors provide,” Gold said.
The iPhone 3G’s current capabilities are “not a bad deal” for sole proprietorships and small- and medium-sized businesses, Weldon said. “But if I were in charge of an enterprise considering the iPhone as a primary tool – a large enterprise, with a complicated, hybrid environment with multiple carriers, multiple devices and security conscious – I’d be slightly paranoid, I’d wait.”
Robust enterprise-related management tools should include “application black- and white-listing” (controlling who can access certain applications and databases and who are barred from them), “session monitoring” (I.T. should be able to analyze individual data sessions to optimize the system or detect malicious acts), full, device-based encryption and “feature control (turning off the camera or Bluetooth function), noted Weldon.
The level of uptake by corporations is difficult to ascertain, but Dow Jones reported soon after the iPhone 3G’s launch that it would allow employees to use the device, with “limited support.”
“The iPhone is being taken up by a broad set of users, except in those environments where high security is required – say, financial services, government, law firms, parties with serious exposure,” Dulaney said. “Most of those segments are going to stick with Blackberrys, I suspect.”
The analyst said that an SDK update might come within three months, but that a major revision might well be a year off.
