The Digital Edge Blog

Apple’s media event last week was a lot more than a simple PR opportunity…

It was really all business. Steve Jobs opened the event, but beyond making introductions, he spent very little time on stage. This was a sales event. Features and capabilities were front and center here, and the folks that did the talking and demoing were the ones directly responsible for what we saw.

And we saw a lot…

Apple’s Phil Schiller demonstrated support for Microsoft’s ActiveSync, giving iPhones a dynamic, remote synchronization with the enterprise standard Exchange server.

The integration of ActiveSync allows calendar events and contacts to be sync’ed directly over the air without the need to dock. Apple is also delivering remote management of iPhones, allowing a corporate administrator to lock or erase the contents of an iPhone if it should be lost or stolen, or configure groups of iPhones centrally. And this went beyond just talk and slides.

Apple demoed each of these features and mentioned specific firms that were beta testing them.

They clearly wanted to impress on everyone that these capabilities are real, and that they would be shipping soon…

By delivering on these capabilities, Apple will have the chance prove it’s mettle in the enterprise world – a market that the current iPhone software fails to seriously address. And that means it will move into direct competition with the current corporate standard bearer - RIM.

RIM has had these types of synchronization capabilities for years, and - recent outages aside - has a proven track record of success. The iPhone, on the other hand, is still the new kid on the block. So what might motivate traditionally conservative enterprises to choose the iPhone over the safe and fully vetted RIM Blackberry?

In a word: Applications…

The announcement of support for ActiveSync was just the warmup act. The main act was the iPhone SDK.

And Apple didn’t disappoint…

The SDK available for the iPhone isn’t some deprecated mobile API with limited platform support. It is a full fledged API with access to every key hardware capability built into the iPhone, and an iSQL database for local data storage and retrieval.

It’s the real deal for real application development…

A rich GUI interface? – Got it.
Access to GPS data? – Got it.
A powerful structured database - Got it.
Details on device orientation and velocity? – Got it.
Full MultiTouch control? – Got it.
Access to contact information? – Got it.

The bottom line is that corporations will be able to build rich, full featured, intuitive applications that extend the user’s desktop into the mobile realm without requiring a laptop. And they’ll be able to do it without having to break the bank on user training and support, and without investing in a mobile strategy that forces users to ‘downgrade’ their expectations of simplicity, functionality, and usability. In fact, the mobile experience on an iPhone can actually equal – or even surpass – that of equivalent desktop applications.

And Apple wants to see more than just corporate IT building iPhone apps…

Apple also made it clear that they are looking to foster a robust 3rd party community around the development of iPhone applications. They showed off some impressive demo applications (from both the business and gaming genres) developed by major companies like Electronic Arts and Salesforce.com.

And in an even more significant move, Apple had venture capitalist John Doehr from Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers close the presentation by announcing the launch of a new $100M fund targeted solely at funding iPhone development.

Apple is banking that applications will be their edge in the enterprise market…

While widely referred to as the “iPhone SDK” event, my take away was that the SDK itself wasn’t really wasn’t the main point in what we saw last week. This event was really the launch of Apple’s enterprise strategy, and the SDK is simply one - albeit highly visible - aspect of that.

By combining Exchange support, rich mobile applications, and a breakthrough handheld device, Apple has all of the ingredients in place to be wildly successful in the corporate space.

So what could hold them back?…

Two things.

First, they are locked in with AT&T exclusively. RIM works with multiple carriers and can offer a solution to pretty much any corporation without requiring them to switch. There’s no easy solution to this except for Apple to sell in to those businesses that are already committed to AT&T, and wait out their agreement.

Second, the current iPhone has no 3G support, and AT&T’s Edge network can be painfully slow. While having strong WiFi support can help to mitigate this, it still limits the device in terms of offering a truly seamless mobile experience. Apple will be releasing the production version of this new software sometime in late June, and I believe they will introduce a 3G capable iPhone along with it.

So where does that leave things?…

The iPhone definitely has some strong momentum behind it, and Apple seems to be making all of the right moves to take it to the next level. That said, Apple is still somewhat new to the politics and internecine struggles that take place around corporate purchasing deals, and will need to come up to speed fast on that end of the business as well. They

It’s an exciting time to be an iPhone user…