iPhone Enterprise Halo
Apple has clearly focused a lot of effort on targeting the iPhone at the enterprise market. A significant amount of emphasis in the iPhone 2.0 update is towards features demanded by existing and potential enterprise clients.
The iPhone will undoubtedly be a success in the enterprise market. Anyone who doubts that is kidding themselves or trying to downplay the iPhone for marketing their own products.
The question is whether success with the iPhone will lead to increased enterprise Mac sales. There has been a long debate as to whether the iPod Halo effect exists. Will there be an Enterprise iPhone Halo effect.
The key factor is that enterprise IT departments will have to purchase Macs and learn Mac development tools to develop custom, internal, iPhone apps. Whilst many enterprises have a small number of Macs in their design, web and media departments, having Macs in their IT departments is much more likely to lead to a wider uptake of Macs.
Although administration and development functions are normally quite separate in enterprise IT departments, administrators are going to make considerably more effort to better integrate Macs into their environment for IT users, than for design or media users. Once IT administrators are confident that they can integrate Macs into their infrastructure, the door is opened for wider scale adoption. With significant misgivings over Vista, readily available Mac VM software and continuing Windows security concerns, removing the biggest barrier to entry – a Mac cynical IT department, will lead to a significant increase in the number of Macs in enterprise.
There is another key user group that will help to drive adoption – gadget hungry executives. As key executives increasingly purchase Macs for their own use, they will demand full access to their corporate infrastructure. Again IT departments will prioritise keeping this user group happy, further weakening barriers to entry.
Combined with the “one” feature of Snow Leopard being better Exchange integration, Apple stands well placed to take advantage of a “perfect storm” of iPhone developers, executive decision makers and a weakened Microsoft to finally make that breach into the enterprise computing market. The question is whether they will listen to enterprise demands for the Mac, in the same way as they have listened to their iPhone demands.
It also opens an opportunity for Mac software developers to develop enterprise class business software, a market segment where the Mac currently suffers. Products like Differencia will hopefully be well placed to help Apple win new business.
