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By Brian Boyko
In an early Network Performance Daily post, we spoke a bit about the impact that the Apple iPhone is likely to have on the company's IT department, and we thought that with some of the announcements of WWDC, it would be worth taking a look back and revisiting some of those ideas.
Back in January, we opined:
- People will use the iPhone at their jobs the way they use Blackberrys now.
- To the end-user, the iPhone is a personal cellphone, with no more need of IT scrutiny then their current phones. To the IT department, the iPhone is a mobile computer, increasing the complexity of the network and creating an additional demand of resources.
- The iPhone's rumored "phone over WiFi" capabilities means that even if you don't intend to roll out VoIP, you may still be dealing with converged traffic on your network.
- The iPhone's web browsing capability may draw additional bandwidth.
- The iPhone would be used as a gateway to SaaS software such as Google Docs and Salesforce.com.
- The iPhone is small enough to steal, requiring data to be secured.
Now that we know a little bit more about it, we can start to revise some of our predictions of how the IT department will have to deal with the new iPhone.
(Continued…)
The big announcement is that third party development will occur on the iPhone, but mostly through the same type of Web apps that are currently common now. It makes sense - Web apps are (supposed to be) platform independent, and developers are not limiting applications to one platform or forcing to recode to multiple different platforms. The release of Safari for Windows helps developers because now they don't need to develop on a Macintosh to develop Web apps for Safari - the same Safari on the iPhone.
However, this presents a few challenges. First, the iPhone only has 4-8GB of storage space, and applications compete with videos and music for that storage space. In this sense, Web applications are not just a smart choice, they're a necessary one.
Web applications require bandwidth - and because the iPhone uses EDGE instead of 3G, those web applications are likely to run slow, or worse, run on your company's WiFi network, taking up bandwidth. Additionally, most, if not all, of these Web apps will be coded in CSS and AJAX. AJAX is a powerful technology. It is also a CPU intensive one - and may not be able to run well on the iPhone's mobile processor.
To be fair, the problems of the iPhone shouldn't be much more difficult than the problems associated with current generation Blackberrys. But here you start to get into iPhone's marketing. The Blackberry is a phone with Internet access, marketed towards those who absolutely must remain in contact on the road - i.e., businesspeople. Which means that more than likely, most of the Blackberrys on your network are devices the company owns - which means they're devices IT can control.
On the other hand, iPhone's media capabilities and higher prices, relative to the Blackberry, makes it an unlikely line-item budget for the IT department. So when iPhones start rolling into the corporate campus, they'll be private property of the employees, not the company. This makes administration more difficult, as you can't just secure the client and be done with it.
So, again, even though it seems like something quite removed from the NOC and network performance, Apple's iPhone - this little consumer level device - is worth keeping an eye on even if you don't plan to own one.
Comments
Brian, this issue is not new, although the iPhone may increase the awareness of the topic within the U.S. marketplace.
FYI, there are millions of PDAs, particularly pocket PCs, enabled with Wi-Fi already in the global marketplace. Most are owned by early-adopter individuals who often gain tremendous productivity benefit from these devices -- myself included.
Most companies have no formal IT policy for dealing with these mobile devices. Regardless -- it's not known to be a major issue at this point in time.
Also, because most enterprise mobile data applications have advanced in the Asia-Pacific and European markets to date -- with little penetration in North America -- it's understandable that an Austin-based company may not know these facts.
That said, if I was an American multinational CEO, I'd worry more about the global competitiveness issues associated with my CIO not having a enterprise mobile data application development game plan. Now, that's a real problem.
Posted by: David H. Deans | June 20, 2007 03:31 PM