iPhone takes on the enterprise

The naysayers said that it would never happen, yet, here we are: At a press conference in Cupertino, CA, Apple announced its enterprise strategy for the iPhone and the biggest surprise is that the company is licensing Activesync from Microsoft and bringing full Exchange Server support to the device. Exchange support will be baked into the iPhone's native Mail, Calendar and Contact applications and Exchange sync can be toggled on and off for each of them. But that's not all; the iPhone also is getting push email/calendar/contacts for the rest of us, support for certificates, identities, Cisco IPsec VPN and WPA2/802.1x and tools for remote security administration, device configuration and even remote wipe capabilities. All of these features will come with version 2.0 of the iPhone firmware, which is scheduled to arrive in June.

Then there's the matter of the iPhone SDK. The SDK, which is available now, allows developers to write native applications for the iPhone using the same APIs and tools that Apple does, as well as Cocoa Touch, a reworked version of OS X's Cocoa programming environment. As expected, applications will be distributed via iTunes and can be either sideloaded on to the device via a PC or downloaded over-the-air. Developers will be able to set their own prices for applications and will receive 70 percent of the revenue from sales; it will cost nothing to offer an application for free, if a developer chooses to do so.

Finally, a few demonstrations during the event gave us a taste of what's to come. AOL demoed a native AOL Instant Messenger client for the phone, something that both enterprise users and consumers have been clamoring for. Salesforce.com's Chuck Dietrich also demoed an iPhone version of his company's flagship app, which seemed surprisingly full-featured and integrated with the phone's native Map application.

All in all, it seems like Apple has a robust strategy in place for enterprise users and IT departments, which is quite surprising, given the indifference that the company has exhibited toward business users in the past. Regardless, just about everyone should be excited about the SDK and enterprise upgrades--except for Microsoft, RIM and Palm.

For more on the announcements:
- see this Ars Technica article on the SDK
- sign up for the iPhone Enterprise Beta Program at Apple's website
- and download the SDK from Apple