For years, hardly a week went by when someone didn't whip out their iPhone and evangelize the unconverted about how amazing it is. Nowadays, that's happening more often at the workplace, as executives switch from their old standbys -- typically the BlackBerry -- to Apple's alluring smartphone.
"It connects me directly to my business software," says Elliott Rabin of San Diego's Ridout Plastics, who is an almost daily user of NetSuite, a business suite produced by a San Francisco software maker of the same name.
"With NetSuite, I can log on to our system via the browser and the iPhone app allows me to check my inventory, my bank balance, or see which products are moving the fastest."
Of course the iPhone is a runaway consumer hit. What's surprising is the traction it's gaining in the corporate world in such a compressed amount of time, industry observers say.
"I think Apple and the iPhone are about to blow the doors off," said Gregg Weiss, founder of iPhoneAppQuotes.com, a Florida-based service for businesses and entrepreneurs who want to get connected with reputable iPhone app developers as well as a lead generation service for developers. "A lot of CEOs are now saying, top down, we've got to run our business with this because so many of the applications are productivity-related."
More Business Apps
According to a July study by iPhone-AppQuotes, what was once among application developers a 50-50 split between producing business applications and consumer applications is now a 70-30 split in favor of business applications. Medical, education, business and book applications are the most requested categories of applications in the Apple App Store, according to the report.
The App Store contains 85,000 applications; an estimated 20 percent of those are business apps.
Rabin says he's downloaded at least 30 business apps from the App Store, which claims 2 billion downloads to date. Among his favorites are an app for Wells Fargo Bank and a Bloomberg app that aggregates business headlines customized to his preferences.
"Since the advent of the 2.0 operating system, which allows connection to Microsoft  Exchange, the dominant enterprise e-mail platform , more businesses are letting the iPhone in," notes Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner, a Connecticut-based information technology research firm. The 3.0 release of the operating system came as further comfort to IT staff, he said. For one thing, data can now be wiped out remotely if the device is lost or stolen. Secondly, it can be configured so that users are forced to create complex passwords. (continued...)
© 2009 San Diego Business Journal under contract with MarketWatch. All rights reserved.
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