We Found 5 Companies Using iPhones… So far
by Yves Neidlinger on 19/02/09 at 4:30 am
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.
A little over 18 months have passed since Apple introduced iPhone to the world. To date, roughly 14 million iPhones have been sold. While it’s been an absolute hit with consumers, businesses are taking a wait and see approach.
This begs the question; are companies deploying iPhones for their employees use? While we are not aware of any major organization deploying iPhones en masse, we did report on Sweden’s Aftonbladt, a tabloid newspaper who purchased 700 iPhones.
Apple’s website recently added a section titled “Profiles in Enterprise” which are case studies on four companies: Kraft Foods, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP, Trek Bikes and SI International:
* Kraft Foods allows employees to use iPhones for calendar and email integrated with Microsoft Exchange. They also leverage the multi-media aspect of iPhone through podcasts dubbed “Kraft Casts” which are for their employees’ benefit.
* Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP is a law firm which has deployed 1700 iPhones to its attorneys. Like Kraft, the iPhones are used for calendar and email. As confidentiality is a major issue for law firms, they use alphanumeric pass codes and remote wipe capabilities.
* Trek Bicycle Corporation uses iPhones to educate its distribution channel of dealers and sales associates using podcasts specially formatted for iPhones.
* SI International, the last company profiled, is similar to the others mentioned except for their reliance on Mobile Safari to provide employees access to their internal web-based timesheet application.
Most other reports offer only anecdotal evidence of companies believed to be in the evaluation phase. Both Nike and Disney have been mentioned, but those should be taken with a grain of salt. Nike offers products integrated with iPod and Steve Jobs sits on Disney’s board. Otherwise, we are only aware of the University of Cologne in Germany which is considering 45,000 iPhone’s for student and teacher use.
Does this mean iPhone is a flop when it comes to enterprise adoption? No. While iPhone’s enterprise shortcomings are well documented, we collectively seem to forget that the device has only been on the market a little over 18 months.
Apple has been supporting the platform with regular firmware updates addressing bug fixes and new features. There are also increasing rumors of a new hardware revision in June. While we don’t expect any radical changes to the device such as the inclusion of a physical keyboard, we are hopeful that the horizontal virtual keyboard found in Mobile Safari makes its way to email and the other applications. This would go towards addressing at least one of enterprises’ complaints with the device. 3rd parties also are picking up the slack and starting to deliver many of the management tools necessary for enterprise to view iPhone as a legitimate alternative to BlackBerry.
We will continue to follow news of companies evaluating and deploying iPhones. If you know of or work at a company that has started using iPhones, drop us a note. We’d like to hear from you.
holliconnell
Oct 23rd, 2009
The two of us at our small video company use them. We use the calendar, email, phone as our contact numbers to clients, show video we've produced and podcasts we'd created. and I use apps like maps, spendlite, ps mobile, cardbank, air sharing, skype, tweetie 2, facebook, print n share, the weather channel and the camera to do work. I use it as a primary hand held computer. I've shot video from it for pieces we've done.
holliconnell
Oct 23rd, 2009
The two of us at our small video company use them. We use the calendar, email, phone as our contact numbers to clients, show video we've produced and podcasts we'd created. and I use apps like maps, spendlite, ps mobile, cardbank, air sharing, skype, tweetie 2, facebook, print n share, the weather channel and the camera to do work. I use it as a primary hand held computer. I've shot video from it for pieces we've done.
holliconnell
Oct 23rd, 2009
The two of us at our small video company use them. We use the calendar, email, phone as our contact numbers to clients, show video we've produced and podcasts we'd created. and I use apps like maps, spendlite, ps mobile, cardbank, air sharing, skype, tweetie 2, facebook, print n share, the weather channel and the camera to do work. I use it as a primary hand held computer. I've shot video from it for pieces we've done.