Enterprises have been reaping benefits from ever increasing capabilities of smartphones. Enterprises focused on their mobility strategy, have slowly evolved from Blackberry lead solutions to BYOD programs. BYOD offered end users to select their own smartphones and has been adopted by leading enterprises.
The BYOD strategy has opened the doors to Apple in enterprises being a preferred smartphone for end users. Apple has always focused on UI & usability of their products and made it a differentiating factor.
With the new OS version announced, Apple has made sure that iOS8 is all set to rule the enterprises. In the recent WWDC event, Apple suggested that 98% of the fortune 500 organizations are using iOS as the preferred mobile OS and they are going to get the rest 2%.
To support their verdict, Apple provided glimpses of how iOS 8 will suite the enterprise users. Following enterprise manageability features with continued focus on security, productivity & management can win the enterprise battle for iOS:
Even other features which are not really focused on enterprise use could be very useful for improving the enterprise apps. For example interactive notifications can improve operating speed for busy users, say for quick approval of requests. A better email app would make it easier for using references from other emails while composing or replying to a thread; as also the new gesture controls makes it easier to flag or delete threads and so on.
Even the newly introduced programming language Swift is targeted to make the development easier, faster, safe and cost effective due to reduced efforts of development. There are several new APIs introduced to allow developing useful functionalities and cool features. This all would help in better adoption of the OS by enterprises. Overall, Apple looks to be well equipped for enterprises.