The release of Agito Global Enterprise, which contains support for the iPhone, validates Apple’s device as an enterprise-ready smartphone according to Agito’s founder Pejman Roshan, while Vodafone’s Peter Kelly has said it is an “outstanding” phone for business use. So is the iPhone ready to take on the BlackBerry as the enterprise phone of choice?

 

“The iPhone is an outstanding phone for business on an outstanding network for business,” Vodafone’s enterprise director Peter Kelly said at an event held in London last month to celebrate the firm’s arrival as an iPhone seller. “If people are going to deploy smart devices, and specifically the iPhone, it’s really important that you have a network you can trust, a network that is reliable.”

That’s quite clearly a dig at O2, which has suffered numerous network connectivity issues since it launched the iPhone in the UK over two years ago. In late December last year, O2 customers across the UK began reporting that they couldn’t access the Internet through their iPhones. The problem lasted up to 48 hours before services were restored. The company also suffered two embarrassing network failures in July last year. O2 head Ronan Dunne even apologised during an interview with the Financial Times about the poor quality of his company’s network.

Vodafone claims its 3G network covers more ground than O2’s and it is investing “hundreds of millions” of pounds in it over the course of 2010, Kelly said. O2 has also claimed that it is investing heavily in beefing up its network to cope with the huge volumes of data that iPhone users are producing.

Kelly believes that the different usage scenarios presented by business users compared to the consumer market will mean that issues such as heavy bandwidth use, poor battery life and the lack of multitasking (the ability to run more than one application at a time) will not cause headaches for IT bosses.

“I think you need to look at the user profile of what an enterprise user does compared to a consumer,” he told us. “Consumers are very bandwidth-hungry, they do lots of downloading of YouTube content for example. While enterprise customers use more mission-critical information, a lot of it isn’t necessarily massive in bandwidth requirements. Consumers can be using two or three times the monthly bandwidth of an enterprise user. We’re confident that our network is capable of handling the data.”

For business users to get the most out of their smartphone they have to be able to work just as productively on it as they would on their desktop or even a laptop. That of course means apps and other programs. Agito’s Global Enterprise platform offers voice calls over Wi-Fi and 3G on the iPhone and turns the mobile into an extension of the office phone. Pejman Roshan, Agito’s founder and CMO, told CBR that the iPhone is now ready for widespread enterprise use.

“We’re seeing a lot of demand in the US for it, less so in the UK and EMEA, probably because North America is ahead of the adoption curve when it comes to iPhones,” he said. “While the BlackBerry still has its fans because of the physical keyboard and email functionality there is heavy demand from our customers for the iPhone.”

Of the 140,000 or so apps available, business-oriented apps are a small but growing number. Companies like Skype, salesforce.com and Cisco’s WebEx have launched iPhone productivity apps and there are countless apps that are designed to make things less complicated for the busy workers – such as flight checkers and live transport information.

There are still a number of drawbacks to the iPhone as an enterprise tool. The battery life is not yet good enough – there is no point having everything you need to do your job on the phone if it can’t last a day between charges – and the lack of a physical keyboard makes typing anything longer than a text message or quick email is a cumbersome experience. That is why the BlackBerry retains its fans in the enterprise space and why it is likely to remain the dominant smartphone.

 

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