In case you missed it, Gartner has written a new report called "iPhone 2.0 Is Ready for the Enterprise, but Caveats Apply." Although I didn't get to read the entire document (for obvious reasons), I really have to question whether the author of the report understands the full requirements of an enterprise mobility solution. Heck, the complete cynic in me wonders how Apple got Gartner to write this piece.
Let's go over this point by point. The report says:
"The iPhone meets our minimum requirements and can be moved to the appliance support level, which means support is limited to a narrow set of applications, such as voice, e-mail, personal information manager and browsing."
OK, so first of all, the device could do all of this when it came out! The big deal is that the device now leverages ActiveSync for a tighter integration with Microsoft Exchange. Let's touch on a couple of points there - while Exchange is certainly the dominant messaging platform in the market, not EVERYONE uses it. What about Lotus and Novell support? People still use that you know. Also, I'm not uber technically versed, but a CIO friend of mine explained to me how the iPhone's implementation of ActiveSync is not 100% native. The gist is that it can talk to Exchange, but it's not a FULL adoption of ActiveSync. I'll take his word on it.
Remote wiping. Gartner says that's covered via Exchange. OK, so Exchange can remote wipe the device, but that's for the email! What about the applications and DATA that you have on the device? What about other passwords? The phone has up to 16 GIGS of space...there's a lot of stuff that you can lose on that device.
But here's the huge problem. There is no true method to manage either the device or the applications that can should reside on it. Enterprises that are serious about enterprise mobility actually leverage dedicated solutions from companies such as Perlego, mFormation, Internoded and Innopath to fully manage the devices and the applications that reside on the device. The also manage how end-users can interact with the device, including preventing them from adding or removing applications. What about OTA updates? Can't do that either. That's only done by Apple via iTunes....because that's an enterprise grade application (don't get me wrong, I only have 7,000 songs on my iTunes playlist).
So now the "ding" from Gartner. The device "does not deliver sufficient security for custom applications." Thank you, Captain Obvious. How can you even get those applications on the device? You have to send them to Apple, have them approve it and then pay them a cut. This is just BOGUS! This is not how larger enterprises are going to go about managing mobile devices and the applications that run on it. For all their own warts, the Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Symbian platforms are all well ahead of the iPhone in terms of their understanding of corporate needs.
So, that's actually OK. Apple is not an enterprise company, by their own admission. This goes back to what I said when the iPhone 3G was announced: the iPhone may be BUSINESS ready, but it's not ENTERPRISE ready. Gartner's minimum requirements of what makes a mobile device enterprise ready are just that - minimal. Enterprises that have already started down the path of developing real mobile strategies are looking well past just having access to email. The iPhone is simply not there yet, however it can work for the SMB.
