Will the iPhone force Apple to change course?

If you say your product is "enterprise-ready" within earshot of anybody who works for InfoWorld, you'd better be able to prove it. So when Apple claims "IT professionals" will be able to seamlessly integrate the iPhone into their enterprise environments, a great many questions need to be answered.

[ For more on the iPhone in business, see "IT's guide to the iPhone." ]

The fact is, Apple, at least up until now, has focused on delivering well-designed products that are basically self-service. Let's start with that premise.

The problem as I see it is this: Apple has been, in essence, a "unified experience" company (controlling the hardware and user experience with its own UI, operating system and support software) pushing out products that are basically plug-and-play within the Apple environment.

The enterprise is about applications; Apple is not
I don't think anyone can claim that Apple is an applications company.

But the iPhone presents a new challenge for Apple, in that it will require the company to provide mobile applications support. When that happens, a whole new set of services will be required of Apple.

For example, as much as those in IT complain about the high cost of maintenance and support from the likes of Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and IBM -- and I've heard those complaints firsthand -- the truth is, IT couldn't live without those companies' supports services.

These companies could probably give away their software and still maintain a healthy profit thanks to maintenance contracts rather than acquiring new licenses. Oracle's acquisitions of PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel and so on had a lot to do with that calculation of revenue from maintenance and support contracts.

So now we come to Apple. It delivers products that usually deliver a great user experience and set a high design bar for integrated technology systems.

What it is not is an applications software company with a huge network of system integrators, consultants, and VARs, nor does it have a homegrown network able to support a huge enterprise-level customer base.

And let's face it, if enterprise companies buy computers in the hundreds at a time, given the right product, these companies may buy handsets by the thousands.

Making it even more difficult is the fact that even hardware-only companies are now also required to beef up their services. Witness Dell. A few years ago, Dell survived on sending boxes out to the enterprise. But over the past few years, as PCs and servers have become commodities, Dell was forced to look to services to keep investors happy.