An iPhone Model for the Enterprise?An iPhone Model for the Enterprise?

Will your users be more productive if application development is more tightly controlled, or will a more open development environment bring a flourishing of enterprise applications?

I've been thinking more about the iPhone since writing this post on No Jitter last week. Specifically, I've been trying think about whether an iPhone App Store model is a good way to provide Unified Communications to the enterprise user. There's no question that the App Store and iPhone development model has brought a flourishing of innovation for this platform - granted, some of the innovations have been pointless or downright anti-social, but there's been a ton of interesting stuff done, and any business that believes its customers are heavy iPhone users has a strong incentive to develop their own specialized apps to serve that clientele.In many ways, the public 3G/4G cellular marketplace is similar to the enterprise communications marketplace, in that multiple incompatible platforms are fighting for dominance, and users pick a horse to bet on: BlackBerry or iPhone or Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian. In the enterprise, you're choosing among Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, etc. In both cases, you're very unlikely to have all your users on a single platform, nor is there much prospect of real interoperability between the platforms, so ultimately you as the network manager are going to have to live with the incompatibility.

That's a tough pill for enterprises to swallow, but it's a pill they've been swallowing for years, so maybe it's not the worst thing. The question is whether your users will be more productive if application development is more tightly controlled, or whether a more open development environment will bring a flourishing of enterprise applications, as it has stimulated iPhone development. And whether such a flourishing is key to innovation within the enterprise's own business.

Intuitively, you'd think the latter: Basing your business model on a developer community has been the hallmark of success in a software world, which we're all being told is what enterprise communications is moving toward. Every enterprise communications vendor will tell you that they're a software company and that they have a developer community, but most would be hard-pressed to say they've actually based their business model on this developer community's success and flourishing. So the business model question is still up in the air.

My other thought is that the iPhone model is almost irresistible when you look at the end results, in terms of how many developers are writing applications and how cool many of those applications are--but the truth is that a lot of the iPhone applications really leverage the device as a static computing platform: It's sort of like, how cool would it be if you could carry a Mac in your pocket with you? The answer seems to be: Very cool. But communications applications running in real time do have different requirements from computing applications, and so the real question is whether the call control functionality is really a differentiator in enterprise communications--it clearly doesn't seem to be in cellular communications.

The other question is whether enterprise communications is as device-centric as consumer wireless is. You could argue that an enterprise communications system doesn't need to be able to provide a proliferation of applications: It needs to be able to provide reliable, high-quality connectivity, and to deliver real-time communications capability to the few applications that are business critical. If the niche-y innovative apps live on consumer-grade platforms, that's complementary to the business system rather than one being a replacement for the other. Workers will use consumer devices and apps for business regardless, so it may be better to make a space for this wild and wooly communications environment alongside the tightly controlled, mission-critical enterprise system.Will your users be more productive if application development is more tightly controlled, or will a more open development environment bring a flourishing of enterprise applications?