Nine reasons not to use an iPhone in an enterprise

Now that the iPhone is out, users want cor­po­rate IT man­agers to let their iPhones work with cor­po­rate email servers. It’s tricky, as I’ve men­tioned before on June 29. Sev­eral blog­gers, includ­ing Jason Levine and John Gru­ber, have posted very good arti­cles on how enter­prises might deal with iPhone users.

The iPhone isn’t ready for busi­ness users yet

ZDNet’s Rus­sell Shaw has posted an arti­cle that lists Gartner’s seven rea­sons why the iPhone is not ready for the enter­prise. Gart­ner ana­lyst and report co-author Ken Delaney warns com­pa­nies not to buy iPhones for the fol­low­ing rea­sons, which I’ve quoted from the ZDNet arti­cle. My com­ments are in italics:

1. Apple’s “rudi­men­tary” expe­ri­ence design­ing mobile devices specif­i­cally for the enter­prise — this is a first gen­er­a­tion device, after all. Microsoft, RIM, Nokia and other com­pa­nies have a seri­ous head start on this item.

2. Lack of sup­port from mobile man­age­ment and mobile secu­rity soft­ware util­i­ties - there’s no third party soft­ware sup­port for the iPhone in this area yet, and there won’t be until Apple opens up the iPhone API. Giz­modo claims there will sup­port late in 2007. Apple might stop unau­tho­rized iPhones from being recharged, accord­ing to this patent. But that’s a far cry from mon­i­tor­ing mobile devices in the field.

3. Lack of com­pat­i­bil­ity with major busi­ness e-mail sys­tems — iPhone can han­dle POP and IMAP4, but Microsoft Exchange servers need this update to sup­port IMAP4.

4. An oper­at­ing sys­tem not licensed to third-party hard­ware sup­pli­ers, result­ing in no backup — Apple is the only source for the iPhone hard­ware. Users are sup­posed to backup their iPhones with iTunes.

5. No remov­able bat­tery, cre­at­ing the poten­tial for increased sup­port costs — while Apple has announced a mail-in pro­gram for iPhone bat­tery replace­ment, the user can­not open an iPhone and dis­con­nect the bat­tery. I used that trick a cou­ple of times a week on my Cin­gu­lar 8125 when it needed a reboot.

6. Only one car­rier oper­a­tor (AT&T Wire­less) — at least in the United States, and that exclu­sive will last at least 2 years. Apple’s com­peti­tors sup­port every major cell phone car­rier in the US.

7. The high price point, $499 for 4GB or $599 for 8GB — the iPhone is an expen­sive device with no quan­tity dis­counts. Lost an iPhone, and the hard­ware replace­ment cost can be high. Mem­ory can’t be expanded because there is no exter­nal mem­ory slot.

I’d add two more rea­sons to this list:

• The iPhone is clearly an enter­tain­ment device. It’s a very nice video iPod with a phone, a data con­nec­tion, and web apps. But at it’s heart, iPhone is all about dri­ving more users to iTunes.
• The iPhone has some Inter­net and pro­duc­tiv­ity fea­tures built in, but the doc­u­ment view­ing fea­tures, cal­en­dar and con­tacts list can’t be eas­ily synced to a cor­po­rate net­work yet. Give Apple and its part­ners some time. Cor­po­rate sup­port will come if sales are strong.

Tagged as: Apple, computer, email, enterprise, hardware, Internet, iPhone, Microsoft, mobile, office, privacy, security, software, USA