I’ve seen these speculations before that Apple’s iPhone may support Exchange ActiveSync in the future.
It’s a cool device without a doubt, but I don’t yet see the benefits of this formfactor as a business device (heavy email usage for example)
View is very Microsoft Exchange centric… I have no problems with that 🙂 …
Analyst firm suggathests that Apple might add enterprise devices or applications to make phone more adaptable, secure.
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Gartner previously dismissed the idea of iPhones becoming business tools, but the analyst group seems to be warming to the possibility.
“I would expect Apple in the future might see some potential in the enterprise market and maybe have devices for enterprise users, or maybe just add to their phone some of the features which would make the device more reasonable for an enterprise deployment,” said Monica Basso, research director at Gartner. “Certainly the support for (the Microsoft synchronization program) ActiveSync is one of these, (as is) independence from the carrier.”
Basso said that enterprises’ need for flexibility meant different back-end servers would need to be supported, and suggested that a licensing of Microsoft’s mobile-synchronization software would make the iPhone more attractive to businesses using the company’s Exchange Server messaging software.
“The Exchange e-mail server is the market leader…I would expect in the future it might happen that we see Apple licensing the ActiveSync software to support direct push on their phones, as Nokia and other manufacturers have done,” Basso said in an interview on Tuesday. “It is not impossible despite the fact that Apple and Microsoft don’t look like partners. There would be some mutual benefits for both of them.”…
Source: Gartner: Expect an enterprise iPhone
Author: Date originally published: Tue, 04 Sep 2007 16:47:00 GMT
