Apple is starting to push the iPhone from the realm of the trendy and hip into the enterprise. Maybe el Jobso will be trading in his black t-shirts and Adidas running shoes for Brooks Brother suits.
Here’s the copy from the Apple web site:
What makes iPhone a great business phone? Simple. The same features that make it a revolutionary mobile device. With iPhone 2.0 software, iPhone does even more for your enterprise. It supports Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, delivering push email, calendar, and contacts. And it gives mobile users secure access to corporate resources with Cisco IPSec VPN and wireless network services with WPA2 Enterprise and 802.1X authentication.
Maybe the iPhone is becoming a PC device, as in pretty corporate.
Here’s a video with corporate IT guys talking about how great the iPhone is for the mobile enterprise even the U.S army talks about how important the iPhone is for highly mobile forces that get shot at.
This month’s cover story for VAR Business touts the Attack of the Alternatives. The premise is certain companies are gaining or having success in the shadows of the market leaders because they are offering a greater value then the market giants:
Just ask Matt Medeiros, president and CEO of SonicWall Inc., and Jack Domme, COO of Hitachi Data Systems. Both have competed for years against two of the biggest, baddest wolves (Medeiros against Cisco Systems (NSDQ: CSCO) Inc.; Domme against EMC Corp (NYSE:EMC).).And both have led their companies to big sales and profit gains by providing more value for customers and more margin for their partners.
The story got me thinking of all the open source alternatives to proprietary market leaders. In the article, Sonicwall and Hitachi are beating their competition by providing greater value (at what seems to be at the cost of lower margins) but I think that cost competitiveness is very hard to sustain. Ironically they just aren’t following the lead of their proprietary brethren in raising and complicating their pricing structure.
In contrast you have open source vendors that are beating their competition but they are doing so by being disruptive in ways drastically different than Sonicwall and Hitachi. They are adhering to Clay Christensen’s model of disruptive innovation. The model is that usually defined by new technologies entering the market in the low quality use and then moving up through to the most demanding use. They typically start out a much lower price point and gain momentum and increase as the product matures. Linux is a superb example. In early use Linux was often used as the operating system for less mission-critical applications like web and file servers. Today mission critical applications like those from Oracle and SAP are hosted on Linux.
Today my final editorial as the Editor in Chief of Enterprise Open Source Magazine published. It was a good run and I appreciate all the kind words and support I got today from present and past readers. I will miss publishing as the founding editor but I probably won’t miss the pressure of my ever-looming monthly deadlines. Stay tuned here for future articles.
Hello,
my name is Mark Hinkle
and I am technology enthusiast and executive for Zenoss Inc. the maker
of the open source
monitoring software, Zenoss Core. This is my personal blog
and does not reflect the opinions of my employer. I am also on the
advisory boards for open
source collaboration software maker, MindTouch and
SourceForge, the world's largest repository of open source software.
If you want to find out more you can read my bio.
Apple is starting to push the iPhone from the realm of the trendy and hip into the enterprise. Maybe el Jobso will be trading in his black t-shirts and Adidas running shoes for Brooks Brother suits.
Hello,
my name is 
