Solution providers looking to support mobility
and mobile phones such as BlackBerry and Treo as a part of their practice have
been noticing something different lately. The realm once ruled by BlackBerry
has been infiltrated by a young upstart—the Apple iPhone.
During Apple’s most recent earnings call, company executives told analysts that
iPhones were being used in 50 of the Fortune 100 companies today. It’s
something that enterprise mobility solution providers have been noticing as
well.
"We are starting to get requests to support the iPhone," says Melanie
Gray, president and CEO of Movero Technology, an enterprise mobility solution
provider based in Austin, Texas. "This is not just something I’m supporting on
the side now."
Companies that never would have thought of letting in an iPhone a year ago have
allowed employees to start using their devices on the corporate network and now
are looking for ways to roll them out to the rest of the staff, Gray says.
This provides more of a services opportunity for solution providers like
Movero, says Gray, who notes that she doesn’t mind that Apple doesn’t really
have a reseller program for the iPhone. Her company doesn’t make money on
device sales; it makes money on services.
"I love all the new mobile OSes coming out," she says. "They are
a new challenge to the enterprise. Now you have multiple carriers with
different OSes. Now you have iPhone and Android coming in."
Part of the reason why the iPhone is making inroads into this exclusive club of
enterprise mobility solutions is that other new solutions are available that make
the iPhone more enterprise-friendly. Case in point: Trust Digital, which is
introducing a new channel partner program Nov. 16 that incorporates the iPhone
into its enterprise mobility management solution.
Trust Digital offers an enterprise mobility management console for iPhones that
enables secure e-mail access, the creation and provisioning of device policies,
the distribution of device certificates, and the monitoring of device status,
and also ensures user and corporate compliance, according to the company.
Nick Turner, vice president of service provider sales for Trust Digital, says
solutions such as BlackBerry Enterprise Server provide control and management
for an array of devices, giving managers control over the fleet. And lack of
that control is what IT organizations don’t like about the iPhone.
However, "We fill that hole for iPhone," Turner says. Turner says
Trust Digital launched iPhone support in January and it began to take off in
June when the iPhone 3GS was launched.
Gray says she is using an iPhone now personally, but the rest of her sales team
is still using BlackBerrys.
"That’s typical for most of our customers," says Turner. "The
C-level executive gets the iPhone first and then it spreads. If you look at how
BlackBerry started in the enterprise—well, that’s how it started, too."
At some companies, users are now "double-barreling it" with a BlackBerry
in one hand and an iPhone in the other hand, says Turner.
"We have a problem today that we are not managing," he says.
"Innovation is being driven by the user. We let IT embrace that."