Technology

iPhone—who for?

By Alice Kok | 26 August 2008

Chances are that you want one, your colleague wants one – but does your organisation want to give you one?

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With the latest iteration of the iPhone, Apple looks set to make a play for the enterprise market – and that means that the more experimentally minded public sector organisations are likely to begin examining the business case soon.

The iPhone mobile handset has also been made compatible with Microsoft Exchange email system, and has remote management – key ‘must haves’ for IT departments.

But it is unlikely to be enough for now. According to a study released by Bernstein Research, RIM’s BlackBerry currently rules the roost.

The survey of 105 CIOs found that just two per cent plan to roll out Apple’s new mobile handset within their organisations in the next 12 months.

“Our CIO survey suggests that corporate iPhone use will be driven by employees purchasing their own iPhones, rather than company-wide deployments. If this persists, it may ultimately limit iPhone’s penetration into the corporate space,” explained Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein Research. The silver lining for Apple is that 10 per cent of the survey’s CIOs currently support iPhones that employees buy on their own initiative—and that figure looks set to rise to 25 per cent over the next 12 months.