Businesses must look beyond the smartphone feature wars
Apple has previewed its iPhone OS 4, whose SDK contains 1500 new APIs and is available in beta to developers. The latest version of the OS, which will also run on the new iPad tablet and iPod touch media player, supports 100 new features, according to Apple, and will be in users’ hands sometime this summer.
At this point, comparing features among the plethora of mobile devices out there would take a spreadsheet about the size of Montana. And while users care dearly that their personal device does their bidding exactly the way they like it, enterprise IT departments also want to know about back-end stuff, like if and how they can distribute software over the air to the devices and what kind of management and security capabilities are baked in.
Apple reveals the new iPhone OS 4.0
It sounds like fortified enterprise features are coming from Apple in OS 4 but not a lot of detail has been shared yet. The company said, for example, that in OS 4 “a new Mobile Device Management service can be integrated with third party servers to wirelessly configure, query and even wipe or lock managed iPhones.”
It’s not quite clear what the mobile device management (MDM) capabilities are and which “third-party servers” Apple is referring to. They might mean MDM consoles from mobility management specialists such as Good Technology, MobileIron, Sybase, Zenprise and at least 30 others. Or they might take an approach like Odyssey Software, whose Athena MDM product feeds up to existing management consoles such as Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager and other systems from CA and HP.
Apple also said that iPhone OS 4 “enables enterprises to securely host and wirelessly distribute their own in-house developed apps to employees.” This is definitely going in the right direction. Most businesses don’t want to be beholden to Apple and its iTunes distribution channel for deploying their internal apps.
Now, some in the blogosphere are complaining that the new OS doesn’t support Flash and that its multitasking support is limited. And online arguments are breaking out over whether the new OS will make BlackBerry obsolete (unlikely).
Overall, though, businesses will simply have to await clarification on some of these features before they can decide how excited to be about the new OS from an IT perspective.
