Security concerns be damned, the iPhone is selling like hotcakes when it come to business users, said AT&T business solutions CEO Ron Spears. While attending a Barclay’s Capital Communications event today, Spears was asked how businesses are taking to the iPhone some three years after its launch. The answer, according to Spears, is very, very well. By his estimates, a whopping 40% of iPhones sold by AT&T go straight into the hands of corporate folk. All of this despite the fact that the iPhone OS is nowhere near as secure as corporate staple BlackBerry. But to this Spears pointed out that most CIOs are okay with having iPhones in their midst and that, for some companies, they’re even huge money savers being able to replace laptops. Here’s what Spears said in his own words:
“When the iPhone came out, what most people heard in the first year from ‘07 to ‘08 was ‘oh my God, it’s not BlackBerry secure.’ This is not going to work on the enterprise space. At the end of the day, it’s just software. That’s all it is. And by the time the 3G came out in ‘08 they had solved about 80% of the security issues. By the time the 3GS came out last summer, most CIOs will tell you today they have very few issues around the security that they need provided as they have come to know that RIM can do it because of the way RIM provides their solution. So enterprises today view the iPhone as a mobile computer. It happens to have a voice application on it. But what’s important is what you can do with it, and the way you can mobilize workforces, and specific parts of your workforce, not the entire workforce. […] If they’ve got a field service force that needs one or two applications on a daily basis; do they need to go out and spend $1,000 or $1,200 for a laptop and then worry about sort of the lifecycle costs of keeping up with the laptop?”
Let fire your comments, readers.
