June 9th, 2008
Apple: 35 percent of Fortune 500 in iPhone beta
Apple CEO Steve Jobs went a little enterprise in his Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) keynote and put some numbers behind iPhone’s traction.
As most of the world has known, the iPhone 2.0 software as three parts: Enterprise support, the software development kit (SDK) and new features.
See live coverage from: Ed Burnette, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, News.com, Engadget and Tech Trader Daily.
What’s notable is that Jobs (right credit CNET) broke out the enterprise tradeshow staple–videos of customer testimonials. Apple claims 35 percent of the Fortune 500 has participated in the iPhone 2.0 beta program. The top 5 banks, the top 5 securities firms, 6 or 7 top airlines and other industries such as entertainment and pharmaceuticals.
What remains to be seen is how many of these beta companies turn out to be volume buyers. But a little VPN, push email and Exchange support can go along way.
Jobs just got rolling with more fireworks on the way, but it is notable that Apple is at least giving the enterprise a little love.
The rub: Apple is killing bloggers who only want to hear about the 3G iPhone. Welcome to another enterprise tradeshow staple–too many video testimonials.
But there is some meat here to ponder. Developers will get unified push notification support. In addition, Apple added support for Microsoft Office documents as well as its own iWork.
Ed explains:
11:06 am: (Steve Jobs:) New iPhone features include contact search, iWork documents (read only), Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Now if they could just hook up a VGA projector to that puppy I wouldn’t need to lug my laptop around so much.
11:04 am: The way it works is Apple maintains one connection to your phone from its servers. 3rd party servers talk to that server, which pushes things down to your phone. This will be available in September but will be previewed to developers soon.
11:02 am: Apple’s solution is to have a push notification service any developer can use.
That’s enterprise friendly and Ed hints at the big picture: Smartphones (not to mention mobile Internet devices) vs. laptops.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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