Is 3G iPhone an Option for Business Customers?

The iPhone. Yes, the iPhone. It is one of those things that will forever be caught up in the zeitgeist of 2008, long after the year is past, kind of like Y2K worries colored the turn of the Millennium, or 2005 will forever be linked with hurricanes. Or rather, one hurricane in particular.

The iPhone may be a perfect storm of tech goodness, but what does it mean for the channel partner serving the business market? The answer is, plenty.

First of all, and this may sound obvious, but one can’t ignore it. Pre-3G launch, Apple’s Steve Jobs said — by his own calculations — the iPhone represented 28 percent of the smartphone market share in the United States, behind RIM and the BlackBerry, while Apple’s mobile Web browser, Safari, enjoyed a 71 percent usage rate, well thrashing Internet Explorer. After selling one million iPhone 2.0s in its opening weekend in July, Apple went on to sell out of the gadget across the country less than 10 days later — and it expects to sell 10 million by the end of the year. So ... that percentage might have just gone up.

And who uses smartphones more than business users? This is not just any smartphone, but one with quick access to the open Internet. It begs the question of security and management, so partners should be prepared to explore those topics with clients. According to security firm Trend Micro, malware purveyors are likely to be more attracted to the iPhone than Pam Anderson is to short-term marriages, so users need to be educated on risky behavior, like downloading third-party applications from somewhere other than Apple’s Apps Store, or synching directly to Web mail without running it through an external mail filter first. So far, no security software is available for the iPhone. It does, however, allow remote wiping of data in case of theft or loss, and Apple has added the option for two-step authentication.

That said, partners should be prepared to tell clients that Apple-delivered apps should be clean, as all downloads are checked and approved by the Apple servers; and likewise that external corporate mail servers can clean messages before pushing them to the phone.

And about those apps and e-mail: partners also need to be able to explain the functionalities of both. There are native nods to business users on the handset; the $199 device (that’s for the 8GB version) offers native push e-mail capability, plus synching to contacts, calendars and global address books. It also integrates business-friendly Cisco Systems Inc.’s IPsec VPN functionality for direct, less complicated access to the Cisco client, familiar to many businesspeople.