if the iPhone won’t come to the Enterprise, then…
iPhone is not available to business accounts in the US and iTunes balks at registering the iPhone to a non-residential address in the UK so it’s certainly not aimed at the Corporate Road Warrior but as I’ve blogged a lot recently, there certainly a lot of buzz about the iPhone and not just from consumers, but from big business. SAP as previously discussed is bringing their product to the iPhone because their own people want it (and as we now know, the SAP client is being developed using a pre-release iPhone SDK here in Belfast).
Avaya, one of the big names in modern telephony, has also signed up to the iPhone and therefore lent it some serious credibility in the Enterprise.
Avaya one-X Mobile for iPhone will allow users to have access to visual voicemail, corporate directories, and VIP lists, all via an “enterprise-secure” environment, and allow the iPhone to be used for both incoming and outgoing calls while maintaining users’ office identity.
Click for the flash demo (which, of course, you can’t view on an iPhone).
Nortel, (never the visionary) hasn’t leapt onto the bandwagon for either Contivity or their IP phone products. But then they’ve been hot on air and cold on “actually doing anything other than loudly collaborating with Microsoft”.
Good oh!
December 27th, 2007 at 12:12 am
I’ve been using my iPhone for only a couple weeks now. The first thing that struck me was the clearly and deliberately limited choice of features. If the iPhone is adopted in corporate environments, it will be the corporates bending to work with the iPhone, and not the other way around. Although I’ve heard they’re working to support MS Exchange!
I visited Microsoft in Silicon Valley a couple weeks ago with the PaddysValley crew. They demoed their Nortel communications stuff with pride. “Look how easy it is to mail John to set up a conference call”. Each contextual dropdown had nearly 20 options. It was a nightmare but the big enterprise guys spend millions on it!