Is the Apple iPhone losing control?

By DiVitas Chief Blogger

Apple’s announcement this week of its iPhone enterprise play stirred up a lot of controversy. Tons of air-time was spent analyzing whether the popular-among-consumers iPhone is good enough to penetrate the corporate-mobile market forged by RIM.

Among the topics bandied about: Is the iPhone more reliable than the Blackberry (which has put users through several painful, nation-wide outages)? The answer to the reliability issue remains to be seen (but if iPhoners experience problems, I’m sure RIM will let us know).

And what about the iPhone’s new SDK? Apparently it has a major shortcoming, which is referred to by FierceMarkets as an “ominous limitation” because it “deliberately cripples third-party apps.” According to the FierceMobileEnterprise.com news site, Apple’s iPhone can only run one application at a time. This means functions – such as Instant Messaging (IM) – will be shut down when you swap to another task. Essentially you’d have to end your IM chat session to answer a call or browse the Web. Not so appealing if you are mid-IM-chat with an existing or prospective customer, right?

A stronger example of this limitation would be, let’s say, if a caller is mid SIP-VoIP call and a cellular call rolls in. The SIP call would actually die. BAD DESIGN Steve!

While these issues were interesting to read, I found a different topic regarding the consumer-centric iPhone to be also worth contemplating: Are corporate IT departments able to secure the iPhone and apply the kind of control required of a typical enterprise device?

Nope.

Apple seems to have lightly addressed some security issues, but management of these functions remain under end user (mobile worker) control. Basically, the iPhone has the same weak security-and-control services as a standard cellular phone.

In contrast, DiVitas puts all management of elements of the mobile-communications infrastructure in enterprise IT hands. This is because the brains of the DiVitas solution reside on-campus, in the corporate network. IT administrators can manage end user policy-compliance on call usage, network authentication, remote wipe (in the event of a lost device), etc. – just as they would with any mobile computer.

A consumer-centric approach, which puts that control in the end users hands, simply falls short of enterprise requirements.

The iPhone is still missing a lot of key features that you will find in an enterprise mobile solution like DiVitas. FMC is a biggie – as more dual-mode smartphones hit the market, the ability to roam transparently between WiFi and cellular will become a de facto enterprise need. Will Apple iPhone users ever be able to do that? That also remains to be seen, so we’ll save that discussion for another day.

The fact is that this week’s iPhone news is a good first enterprise-try on Apple’s part, and Apple is extremely good at making cool technology that works really well. But just as with its laptop, desktop and OS predecessors, the iPhone seems to be something that will once be more popular among consumers than businesses. Long on flash and short on substance.