Apple takes iPhone corporate in a big way

Apple has given technology managers their iPhone wish list in full in an effort to make its phone more business friendly. The mission: Lure enough enterprises to the iPhone so Apple can hit its 10 million unit goal by the end of 2008.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs kicked off the company's iPhone SDK event in Cupertino, Calif. with a few remarks, but really let Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, do a lot of the enterprise heavy lifting. See Engadget and News.com for live coverage (event just ended) and Apple's statement.

In a nutshell, Schiller noted some enterprise wins such as Genentech using a fleet of iPhones and Stanford also having hundreds of iPhones. Schiller also noted the hurdles with enterprise iPhone adoption: Push email, security policies etc. Then Schiller promised to deliver on the corporate IT wish list by making the iPhone:

• Deliver a global address list and push contact.
• Support Cisco IPSec VPN, enterprise class WiFi. (Was this part of a deal to end the iPhone naming spat?)
• Allow security policies and remote wipe.
• Enterprise configuration.
• And support for Exchange (also see Microsoft's Q&A). Along those lines Apple has licensed ActiveSync for the iPhone. Mary Jo Foley reported that a Microsoft-Apple deal was in the works last year.

It's safe to say the iPhone is open for business now.

What's notable about that final Exchange point is that the two companies collaborated on making Exchange Server work better with the iPhone (see photo right, credit News.com's Corinne Schulze). This collaboration also occurred on the back end so that iPhone users will still use the same email, calendar and contact apps they do today. Just as an aside: Why can't these two do this for corporate email? Entourage for the Mac is a sick joke.

But I digress.

Another notable item is the remote wipe feature, which most corporate phones have. Remote wipe was a big concern for security professionals pondering the iPhone.

Scott Forstall, VP of iPhone software, also outlined the SDK, which was the real reason folks showed up. Although we're more interested in the corporate applications. In a nutshell, Apple is opening up its iPhone APIs to third party developers. This move should bring in more corporate uses eventually.

Forstall noted that the architecture is built on the same OS X kernel. Among the key highlights:

• iPhone database API with SQLite;
• Core Location API so you can create location aware applications (that would be handy for corporations like a sales force in the field);
• An Interface builder, an API that allows third parties to tap into a library of iPhone interface assets.

From a corporate perspective what will be notable if big application vendors such as Oracle and SAP get into the iPhone act. An ERP in your hand application could go along way to convincing any iPhone fence sitters to fall Apple's way. Salesforce.com demonstrated a few applications for the iPhone, but that was to be expected.

And then the next big item to watch is the enterprise halo effect, which will take a few quarters and years to play out. Are Apple's moves good enough for you to turn your company into iPhone fans?

Other odds and ends:

• A lot of the Apple chat focused on the game capabilities of iPhone. It's neat stuff. It's also a productivity drain. Some of the games demonstrated almost made the iPhone look like a Sony PSP.
• Apple will have an app store where developers collect 70 percent of the revenue--assuming the software isn't free. Apple will ban malicious apps, porn and other software that's a headache.
• All of these capabilities will be delivered via an iPhone 2.0 update in late June. Today is the beta release.