Ken Dulaney, Gartner VP distinguished analyst and general mobile device guru, told the crowd at the Gartner Mobile & Wireless Summit today that he still can’t recommend businesses adopt the iPhone — even with an SDK. Dulaney said that he recently wrote Apple a letter in which he outlined several things Apple would need to do with the iPhone before Gartner could change its mind about it. The directives included:
- Permit the device to be wiped remotely if lost or stolen
- Require strong passwords
- Stop using iTunes for syncing with a computer
- Implement full over-the-air sync for calendar and PIM

Jason Hiner, TechRepublic March 5th, 2008

On the same day Dulaney said this in Chicago, Phil Schiller of Apple was holding a news conference in Santa Clara granting some of these wishes, and many more:

• Microsoft Exchange support with built-in ActiveSync.
• Push email
• Push calendar
• Push contacts
• Global address lists
• Additional VPN types, including Cisco IPsec VPN
• Two-factor authentication, certificates and identities
• Enterprise-class Wi-Fi, with WPA2/802.1x
• Tools to enforce security policies
• Tools to help configure thousands of iPhones and set them up automatically
• Remote device wiping

At the news conference Apple wheeled out several corporate endorsers: Genentech, Stanford University, Nike and Disney.

At first blush, the new enterprise-oriented capabilities of the iPhone appear to be an IT manager’s dream come true (though it will be a while before the dream is a reality.) Even this contrarian post concedes that it will make the iPhone more competitive with the Blackberry, while faulting Apple for not having a comprehensive enterprise strategy.

Apple is clearly serious about the enterprise smartphone market, and this strategy is sound. The business market supports price points that easily accommodate the iPhone, and this strategy spills over to the business PC market in two ways: today by acting as a door-opener for Mac sales, tomorrow by evolving the iPhone into a PC replacement for many users.

UBS thinks that the 3G iPhone will be released mid-year. iLounge reports that the much-anticipated iPhone SDK will be delivered in June, at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. A beta version will be released at an announcement event on March 6th.

There are several reports that Apple intends to target business users with the iPhone, competing with Blackberries, Nokia’s Eseries and Windows Mobile devices. Since the SDK reportedly will expose interfaces to the phone and Wi-Fi, developers of Wi-Fi soft-phones and enterprise Fixed-Mobile Convergence systems will presumably add iPhone support to their existing Symbian and Windows-supporting products. It remains to be seen how easy it will be for developers to actually get their software “officially” onto the iPhone. Apple can choose their degree of open-ness from a variety of options discussed here.

For Apple to aim at the business market makes a lot of sense. With the successful transition to Intel processors Macs already run Windows natively, and iPhones are supposedly making inroads among executives. According to ChangeWave, summarized here, the iPhone has a 5% share of corporate smartphones already, with astronomical ratings for satisfaction.

To make enterprise IT departments happy, though, Apple will have to make the iPhone more manageable; either by building in OMA DM like Nokia with the Eseries, or by letting third parties develop enterprise manageability clients using the iPhone SDK.

Competitors aren’t sitting still for this. The October 2007 announcement of “Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager” was a step forward for Windows Mobile in the enterprise. Microsoft is also leaking stories about how when Windows Mobile 7 is released in 2009 it is going to be more of a pleasure to use than the iPhone. It is conceivable, I suppose, but Microsoft’s track record on usability is pretty consistent. The fundamental part that they invariably seem to get wrong is instant response to user input.

QoS metrics are important, and several companies have products that measure packet loss, jitter, latency and so on. But you can have perfect QoS, and your VoIP system can still be defective for all sorts of reasons.

I spoke with Gurmeet Lamba, VP of Engineering, at Clarus Systems at the Internet Telephony Expo this week. He said that even if a VoIP system is perfectly configured on installation, it can decay over time to the point of unusability. Routers go down and are brought up again with minor misconfigurations; moves, adds and changes accumulate bad settings and policy violations.

VoIP systems are rarely configured perfectly even on installation. For example, IP phones have built-in switches so you can plug your PC into your desk phone. Those ports are unlocked by default. But some phones are installed in public areas like lobbies. It’s easy for installers to forget to lock those ports, so anybody sitting in the lobby can plug their laptop into the LAN. There are numerous common errors of this kind. Clarus has an interesting product that actively and passively tests for them; it monitors policy compliance and triggers alarms on policy violations.

Clarus uses CTI to do active testing of your VoIP system, looking for badly configured devices and network bottlenecks. Currently it works only on Cisco voice networks, but Clarus plans to support other manufacturers.

Clarus started out focusing on automated testing of latency, jitter and packet loss for IP phone systems. It went on to add help desk support with remote control of handsets, and the ability to roll back phone settings to known good configurations.

The next step was to add “Business Information,” certifying deployment configurations, and helping to manage ongoing operations with change management and vulnerability reports. Clarus’ most recent announcement added passive monitoring based on a policy-based rules engine.

Clarus claims to have tested over 350 thousand endpoints to date. It has partners that offer network monitoring services.

Corporations have trimmed their telecommunications expenses down to the bone, but there is still a huge telephone-related money leak at most companies. This is the cell phone bill that so many employees simply expense, so it isn’t a controlled part of the IT department budget.

Businesses are finding it increasingly urgent to manage their cell phones the way they manage their network and computer equipment. One company seeking to help with this is IntegratedMobile.
But bringing cell phones under the corporate manageability umbrella is just the first step in integrating them into the IT strategy. The next step is to treat them the same way as regular phones for their voice capabilities, and as laptops for their data capabilities.

Treating phones the same way we treat laptops would call for a standard managed corporate software build with a common image worldwide.
Treating cell phones the same way we treat corporate desk phones would call for them to have all the standard PBX phone features, and to be administered on the PBX the same way desk phones are.

The trouble with this vision is that there is no worldwide mobile network operator (MNO), and in the US the phones are normally bought through the MNO. So the phone doesn’t exist that can be centrally bought, has a common manageable image installed, and can be deployed worldwide.