With the iPhone is leading its place in the consumer market, it is now also making inroads within enterprises. Especially with OS 3.0 iPhone have made great strides in adding security features geared specifically for the enterprise. Many believe that the iPhone will be the most adopted enterprise device in 2009-10. So the next time you see the iPhone/iPod touch around, it may be in the hands of your competitors, clients, partners, or colleagues. iPhone is becoming hottest device for the mobile Enterprise & mobile workforce. Business users are actively embracing iPhone and bringing it into the mainstream enterprise.
After success of salesforce.com, Quickbooks, Zoho, Oracle on iPhone, most of the enterprise application / software developers (enterprise ISVs) are seriously planning & working on launching their products or its interfaces on iPhone. Early adopters are mostly Enterprise SaaS (Software As a Service)/On-Demand providers focusing on online CRM, PM, ERP, BI solutions.
Major Challenges of designing & developing iPhone Enterprise apps development are:
- Keeping your enterprise iPhone app extremely user-friendly. Apple illustrates the importance of designing new products around the needs of the user, not the demands of the technology.
- Keeping enterprise iPhone app agile to enable high performance accessibility by short listing key functionalities & making them only available on iPhone/iPod
- Ability to push software/application updates automatically
- Control to install and uninstall/logoff applications remotely
- Deciding right commercial model. Most of the companies are offering Enterprise iPhone Apps as a free download from Apple App store but charges additional monthly cost.
e-Zest actively help its Enterprise ISV customer's to make their products available on iPhone/iPod Touch. Interesting Enterprise apps on iPhone : http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/enterprise-apps-iphone-879 & http://www.informationweek.com/news/personal_tech/iphone/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212100911
