CIOs say “No iPhone for you”

by on 05/02/09 at 6:03 pm

CIOs say “No iPhone for you”

Yves Neidlinger is a technologist and a social media and marketing consultant. He is the National Channel Manager for Navara and the founder and Editor in Chief of iPhoneCTO.

Unless you’ve been hiding under your sheets to avoid the cold the past couple days, you may have heard about a group of CIOs gathered in New York for an SAP event. The quote making its way through the Interweb comes from Jennifer Allerton, CIO of Roche: “iPhone is not a business tool, but a nice to have.” She finishes with “The backbone is the BlackBerry.” While the latter is not in dispute, the former seems to have stirred up the natives.

Apple has been busy solidifying its place in the consumer market for the past 18 months. Millions of iPhones have since started showing up in companies with the question being asked “Can I get my work email on this?” Not only are the rank and file showing up with iPhones, but CEOs as well, and that is putting additional stress on IT.  IT departments aren’t typically crazy about supporting new devices. It means supporting yet another platform and that means increased costs and complexity. Paraphrasing one twitterer, “CIOs don’t often lose their jobs with the status quo and that hampers the adoption of new technologies.” It comes to no surprise then to see a bunch of CIO’s in New York resistant to this uber-popular device. To be fair, most are probably seeing their budgets frozen or reduced while being asked to do more with less.

The flip side to this conversation revolves around Apple’s long-term strategy for iPhone. While BlackBerry started out in the enterprise and is now also a consumer device, iPhone will likely make a similar transition going from the consumer to enterprise market.

What can Apple do with iPhone to make it more enterprise friendly? While there are numerous articles on the topic with feature-by-feature breakdowns on what iPhone needs, most fans and critics alike agree on at least one shortcoming, the keyboard. The CIOs in New York were right. The keyboard, while innovative, was apparently designed for index finger touch-typing. Check out any iPhone commercial or tutorial at Apple.com and you’ll see that none include typing with thumbs. I have small hands and still struggle with typing anything longer than an SMS. What eludes me is Apple’s reluctance to include the horizontal keyboard in all its’ applications.

If you’ve used Mobile Safari in landscape mode, you will find the keyboard adapts to the switch from horizontal to landscape. Unfortunately, that capability doesn’t exist in the other applications. This simple addition would mitigate many of the objections users have with the keyboard. While for many, the ideal solution would be a physical keyboard, it is commonly known that Steve Jobs loathes buttons (fans too). In fact, Steve had to be convinced to include the Home button that is on the device now. My expectation is that in order to gain acceptance in the workplace, Apple will add the virtual horizontal keyboard functionality in all their built in applications. I’m holding out hope for haptic feedback similar to the BlackBerry Storm, but with Apple’s usual elegance.

Despite the comments made in New York, iPhone will become a viable competitor in the enterprise. The drumbeats are growing louder from cubicles everywhere.

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  • Richard Lynch

    CIO’s that don’t understand and utilize the inherent capabilities of the iphone to increase the productivity of their knowledge workers will not be CIO’s very long. With apps like “Meet” that allow mobile knowledge workers to participate in webex meetings on the go the iphone leaves the crapberry in the dust when it comes to increasing accessibility and productivity. The integrated calendar of the iphone also is a huge plus over the crapberry.

  • Richard Lynch

    CIO’s that don’t understand and utilize the inherent capabilities of the iphone to increase the productivity of their knowledge workers will not be CIO’s very long. With apps like “Meet” that allow mobile knowledge workers to participate in webex meetings on the go the iphone leaves the crapberry in the dust when it comes to increasing accessibility and productivity. The integrated calendar of the iphone also is a huge plus over the crapberry.

  • http://www.atvur.com Alisan Atvur, Senior Editor @

    With budgets frozen at many companies, we can expect that CIOs are circumstantially hesitant to upgrade/develop their mobile communications systems. Unless Blackberry has something hidden up its sleeve, the iPhone will eventually dominate the enterprise market.

  • http://www.atvur.com Alisan Atvur, Senior Editor @ iPhoneCTO.com

    With budgets frozen at many companies, we can expect that CIOs are circumstantially hesitant to upgrade/develop their mobile communications systems. Unless Blackberry has something hidden up its sleeve, the iPhone will eventually dominate the enterprise market.

  • Terrence Gabriel

    My workplace management needs to upgrade its wireless infrastructure and along with that their desire is to figure out some way to restrict the wireless (and wired) network to only company provided devices (except for the Blackberry server we were forced to install lest our users stage a very nasty coup) and only company approved software.

    They have solved the software conundrum mostly but it is going to cost a small fortune to keep the odd Mac, iPhone, and “unapproved” machines off the network. The physical device they are contemplating in order to give them their myth of exclusion is going to cost upwards of $60k. For their investment they will get a guest network, a way to authenticate both users and machines and, they hope, piece of mind.

    On our Blackberry server we have 22 authorized users (folks who can get to their Outlook resources on our Exchange servers) but overall there are at least 150 iPhone users many of whom are using our network because we have no way to stop them without that expensive hardware device that our budget cuts for the next two years have eliminated. Of course we have a workaround. Every day I log onto our active directory servers (three of them) and export the wireless user list and then run a batch file to move them to another folder and blend them together by VLAN. I log on to those servers twice a day and since I work at night the only evidence I see of rogues is unexpired DHCP addresses. We allow our leases for 8 hours.

    Our division director (the company CIO) is a staunch Windows person and he very simply will absolutely not make way for anything not Microsoft or Cisco. Friday night I was helping one of our users with a printer problem and we visited about things while I was puttering around with her PC, laptop, and printer. I ended up connecting her to a network printer temporarily until Monday when the printer guy will replace the broken printer. She was watching what I was doing and she commented it took less work for her to get her MacBook Pro (17″ screen), MacBook Air, and iPhone on the network so that she could print work she does at home. Additionally, she uses Apple’s remote desktop connection from home to get access to her network drives where her work files are kept. The whole point here is that she is a capable, smart, innovative woman who had a need but was refused help by my department and puzzled through it on her own. She is one of them rascals that knows how to read!

    Is iPhone enterprise ready? Of course it is, that problem is that the Windows world does not want the competition in the only venue where they can still dominate because their drones hold the power. In five years I am going to retire and I hope to see our mixed MS/Apple network up and running before then. How great would it be for our users to actually be served by its IT department instead of being told why we cannot give them what the are asking for.

  • Terrence Gabriel

    My workplace management needs to upgrade its wireless infrastructure and along with that their desire is to figure out some way to restrict the wireless (and wired) network to only company provided devices (except for the Blackberry server we were forced to install lest our users stage a very nasty coup) and only company approved software.

    They have solved the software conundrum mostly but it is going to cost a small fortune to keep the odd Mac, iPhone, and “unapproved” machines off the network. The physical device they are contemplating in order to give them their myth of exclusion is going to cost upwards of $60k. For their investment they will get a guest network, a way to authenticate both users and machines and, they hope, piece of mind.

    On our Blackberry server we have 22 authorized users (folks who can get to their Outlook resources on our Exchange servers) but overall there are at least 150 iPhone users many of whom are using our network because we have no way to stop them without that expensive hardware device that our budget cuts for the next two years have eliminated. Of course we have a workaround. Every day I log onto our active directory servers (three of them) and export the wireless user list and then run a batch file to move them to another folder and blend them together by VLAN. I log on to those servers twice a day and since I work at night the only evidence I see of rogues is unexpired DHCP addresses. We allow our leases for 8 hours.

    Our division director (the company CIO) is a staunch Windows person and he very simply will absolutely not make way for anything not Microsoft or Cisco. Friday night I was helping one of our users with a printer problem and we visited about things while I was puttering around with her PC, laptop, and printer. I ended up connecting her to a network printer temporarily until Monday when the printer guy will replace the broken printer. She was watching what I was doing and she commented it took less work for her to get her MacBook Pro (17″ screen), MacBook Air, and iPhone on the network so that she could print work she does at home. Additionally, she uses Apple’s remote desktop connection from home to get access to her network drives where her work files are kept. The whole point here is that she is a capable, smart, innovative woman who had a need but was refused help by my department and puzzled through it on her own. She is one of them rascals that knows how to read!

    Is iPhone enterprise ready? Of course it is, that problem is that the Windows world does not want the competition in the only venue where they can still dominate because their drones hold the power. In five years I am going to retire and I hope to see our mixed MS/Apple network up and running before then. How great would it be for our users to actually be served by its IT department instead of being told why we cannot give them what the are asking for.