Apple's iPhone, Mac Seeing Higher Sales to Business - The iPhone Factor
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Another big driver comes from the consumer side. While Apple’s iPhone made up
only 1 percent of 28.5 million “corporate-liable” smartphone shipments in 2008,
according to IDC’s May 2008 market forecast,
that number is growing at a rapid pace as more C-level executives bring their
iPhones to work and more business applications become available for the iPhone.
“We do expect iPhone to grow quickly in corporate-liable enterprise shipments,
and even more quickly and to a larger degree in individual-liable shipments—those
purchased by individuals and used in the enterprise or SMB,” says Sean Ryan,
research analyst for mobile enterprise software at IDC.
IDC plans to release updated enterprise
numbers for iPhones next month.
Apple hasn’t made it easy for corporate IT departments to standardize on the
iPhone. Apple and carrier AT&T are the only entities that can carry out
patches and upgrades on the iPhone, so enterprises that keep a tight hold on
management of their fleets of devices may find the lack of control to be a deal
breaker.
Because of that, the enterprise applications that have found the most success
on the iPhone platform are so-called cloud-based applications, where all the
work is done on some distant server and not on the client device, says Ryan.
Salesforce.com and Sybase both have strong plays there.
The iPhone’s success in enterprises has largely been in spite of Apple's policies,
Ryan agrees.
He notes that market leader Research In Motion’s BlackBerry was built for the
enterprise, while Apple’s iPhone was built for individuals. However, if
Apple and its partners can make the advances that corporate IT wants in device
management and security support, corporate-liable adoption of iPhones will grow
even faster, he says.
“Smartphones are such personal devices,” says Ryan. “People want to use them for
both work and play.”
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