iPhone OS 3.0 Gets Enterprise Cred

by Yves Neidlinger on 30/03/09 at 5:28 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.

The iPhone OS 3.0 update has been announced and by all accounts, it’s an impressive update. But are any of these new features meaningful to the enterprise? While it’s still early and many of the one hundred new features and one thousand new APIs have yet to be revealed, we know enough to safely say iPhone is getting it’s enterprise game on.

Network World recently featured a story which included an interview with Senthil Krishnapillai, director of product management for Sybase. We previously reported on Sybase’s iAnywhere which is one of the products he oversees. This article is relevant because it points out two relevant topics, the inclusion of push notification and the lack of background processing.

On the positive side, the inclusion of push notification is a big step forward. Specifically for business and enterprise users, it means the ability to receive real-time notifications from back-end applications. In the example provided, a lead is received by the companies’ CRM application and the sales rep in the field receives a badge notification update that a new lead awaits their review. Speaking as someone who has been in sales for the better part of fifteen years, this will be very useful. On the flip-side, however, is the lack of background processing. Apple’s reluctance to allow multiple applications to run simultaneously puts a major roadblock on iPhone security which is a concern for any business or enterprise. Device security is impacted by this omission because it means that a security application cannot be running on the device while another application is active. I think it’s safe to say the CIA won’t be issuing iPhones in the near future.

iPhoneCTO will continue to cover the 3.0 OS update as we learn more about new features and the implications on business use. You can also follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/iphonecto for more timely updates.

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