Judging by the 5 million units sold last weekend, the new iPhone 5 has a fair number of fans, even in the face of stiff competition from Android. But the noisy launch and heated war between iOS and Android in the consumer market is accompanied by a quieter but equally crucial battle in the business market.
Hard numbers on the total number of smartphone business lines are tough to find, but a November 2011 poll of 2,300 enterprise workers by the enterprise mobility provider iPass revealed that the iPhone may be the most used business smartphone among private firms. Android is fast closing in on the sinking veteran RIM for second place. According to iPass, 45 percent of the enterprise workers surveyed used an iPhone as their business smartphone.
So how does iOS 6 improve on Apple's already strong enterprise position?
The key to Apple's strategy actually landed before iOS 6 -- in the form of the Apple Configurator tool, which was launched this spring. This product, available on iTunes, helps firms control certain capabilities of the phones used in their networks. It can adjust control for iPhones, iPads, and iPod touch devices according to whether employees are using their own or company-owned devices.
Apple Configurator appeals not just to enterprises but also to so-called mobile device management (MDM) providers. AirWatch, one such company, has offered a list of what it sees as highlights of the latest Configurator tool in a press release. AirWatch and other MDM providers will pass along these capabilities to enterprise IT in the form of software-as-a-service (SaaS).
CIOs and IT professionals may be making more use of these services. The combination of the iPhone 5 and the iOS 6 operating system provides new location-aware and cloud service features. That's great for consumers, but it's an enterprise security headache. Fortunately, the Configurator tool has been updated to lock down many of these features.
For example, IT can prevent Apple's iOS 6 Passbook mobile wallet application from displaying sensitive details: name, employer, etc. IT also can lock PhotoStream to prevent employees from accidentally (or intentionally) sharing sensitive photos. Yet another welcome feature is the ability to turn off recent contact syncing, to prevent contacts from personal email accounts on the device (if allowed) from syncing with the work email account.
Employers wanting to cut down on employee distractions can turn off FaceTime, iMessage, Book Store, and GameCenter. They can lock employees' wallpaper. They can set a global proxy to prevent users from visiting unwanted sites.
Enterprises can even use Apple Configurator to force employees to use only a certain app or handful of apps in a Supervised Mode. This mode combines Guided Access with App Lock, which, among other things, can lock out the home button. Beware, though -- such draconian extremes may alienate executive users.
Apple has also ratcheted up security a couple of notches by adding S/MIME secure mail support and the ability to adopt longer passwords instead of four-digit PINs.
Some MDM features are still missing from iOS, though. There's no support for management with Apple Configurator over wireless links. And putting phones into Supervised Mode requires essentially an OS reinstall, so backups of user data will likely be necessary.
Apple doesn't give companies the ability to recompile its source code and customize special secured mobile operating system builds like Google does. Then again, most organizations don't want or need to put in that kind of effort. Otherwise, Apple's stepwise improvements have made its iOS framework on par with (or in many cases superior to) the management tools offered by Google or Microsoft for their mobile platforms.
Feature-wise, Apple is still a bit behind RIM, which offers management support over the air on wireless connections via products such as the BlackBerry Mobile Fusion. But at the end of the day, the majority of employees don’t want BlackBerrys.
That's why Apple is winning the overall enterprise OS war with RIM -- its short list of missing features is trumped by higher client satisfaction.
If you work for enterprise IT or an MDM firm, Apple Configurator is an appealing option. It won't do your work for you, but it gives you or your contractor the tools you need to secure your platform.
An interesting question, Kim. I guess the answer would be, whenever business work is being done on it. Which is more than you would guess, outside of business hours. I've personally written entire documents using just my thumbs (I'm a touch typist when using a keyboard). The funny thing: I can remember just a few years back (maybe three or four) when the iPhone was a complete outsider in most companies. The IT guys would swear (in most cases, at 'em) that they would never support the darned things, and then a funny thing would happen: the boss would get one, and the word would come down from Upon High that we would find a way to make it work, or else. About a year later, Apple finally got around to making it easier to attach to enterprise mail systems like Exchange, and the last real hurdle fell. It's actually astounding that Apple would go to so much trouble to build tools for enterprise, as they've pretty much thought of businesses as an afterthought, if they thought of them at all (the first Apple IIs wouldn't even do upper and lower case -- you had to jumper the motherboard, using solder and a length of wire, if you wanted it to do that). Then again, they've always been about control, haven't they?
I find it hard to believe that those people were really fooled like that. Wouldn't you recognize a device exactly the same as yours? The video smells like a rat. :D
LOL Ashish! That's just so funny. I don't want to sound elitist here, but the video just shows how a lot of iPhone users don't understand why they have a good phone. Those people didn't even notice they were looking at a 3:2 screen, not a 16:9 widescreen.
The Problem is that most people can't/have lost the ability to think for themselves.
That is the only way to explain what the Comedian ;Jimmy Kimmel just discovered here
http://youtu.be/rdIWKytq_q4
Do watch the Video,its beyond Funny!!!
But it does tell you a lot about the Sheeple thinks(or does'nt).
Stunning,Stunning Video and tells you what a bunch of fools most ordinary Americans are(& also the amazing marketing job that Apple has done on them)!!!
"According to iPass, 45 percent of the enterprise workers surveyed used an iPhone as their business smartphone."
While iOS is an excellent mobile OS, I'd attribute its dominance to the iPhone's celebrity status, which a great deal of professionals would like to have some share in. Half of the iPhone users I know bought it only because it's cool. They do use it for business—specifically SMS, calls, email and, well, email—but not for any functions that even the most lowly of smartphones can't do well. So yes, the iPhone may have a great chunk of enterprise BYOD, but not necessarily because iOS is used as an enterprise platform. Disposable income + a fair amount of vanity = a person who always buys the latest iPhone.
Again, I'm not saying iOS is bad. On the contrary, I think it's a great OS, and by far the smoothest mobile experience you could have. But the vain have caught on, and for vain reasons.
It might be that. Apple's primary customer base are end-users. Apple may successfuly rely on individuals to bring its products into the enterprise as long as they don't cause too much security trouble to the IT staff.
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Whether you’re an engineering firm that uses CAD for parts design, or an e-business that leverages Photoshop for user-interface graphics, you likely require a modest graphics-processing unit. In the old days, this was a daunting hurdle to innovation, but today, the situation has improved thanks to technologies like NVIDIA’s GRID and Microsoft’s RemoteFX. Such virtualized graphics protocols allow you to load-balance graphics-intensive workloads from virtual desktops on a server-side graphics card.
Take a trip down memory lane and imagine, if you will, a system-on-a-chip with Apple IIe-like specs -- 4KB of RAM and 32KB of flash. Add some modern niceties like an ARM Cortex-M0+ 32-bit pipeline, 12-bit DAC, and low-power UART, and you have Freescale's recently unveiled Kinetis KL02, which the company calls "the world's smallest ARM Powered MCU."
Recent reports from the NPD, IDC, and Gartner suggest the end is nigh for ye olde personal computer. They imply that 2017 will be the magic year tablet sales will surpass PC purchases.
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New tools like laptops, tablets, smartphone, and wireless connectivity let us work from San Diego to Katmandu, and anywhere in between. But time management remains a problem.
A survey by JD Powers found that customer interest in product features is lessening as phones evolve. Rather than features, price is driving purchases, and that change could have a dramatic impact on how IT departments secure these devices.
The bring-your-own-device approach isn’t suited to monitoring of enterprise equipment and processes. In these cases, it is up to IT to come forward with gear suited to the task.
With more and more executives relying on mobile devices to complete their work, mobile device management has become as popular as traditional IT management solutions.
Law enforcement agencies are poised to use iPhones as facial recognition systems in the coming months. The technical advance promises efficiency but has created a backlash among civil liberties proponents.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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