As we moved towards the first set of rapids you could feel both a sense of urgency and impending doom. The sun, dominant from the moment we left shore, was now hidden behind storm clouds and lightning lit up the dark skies. Ominous. We were 13 people jammed into a floating dirigible heading straight at something called McCoys Chute on the mighty Ottawa River and it dawned on me that we were all voluntarily paddling forward despite the raging river in front.
Maybe it wasn’t at that very moment that I considered the boat as a metaphor for the enterprise and the raging river, the turbulent wireless handheld space but you can understand that those shouldn’t be one’s final thoughts. It wasn’t until later, much later, that this concept dawned.
That rubber boat we were all steering towards impending death was, in fact, going there without our help. We may have been inside the boat, we may have been paddling, we may have even been ready for what was to come but we were certainly not in control once we set our direction for the tongue of the river. It was bringing us there whether we liked it or not, the question now became how to navigate our enterprise through the rolling white water to a safe destination.
When the iPhone 3G was introduced with enterprise capabilities, the wireless handheld world went from paddling on flat water to a raging river overnight and made it so enterprises, large or small, around the world couldn’t ignore this space anymore. With all the hype and turmoil it was hard to distinguish myth from reality but the reality is that once a path is set in the enterprise, it is very hard to veer off into another direction.
While the second-generation iPhones have enterprise capabilities, the ability to adopt the device into large organizations is not quite there yet. A recent survey of senior wireless experts done by InMobile.org showed that nearly 70% of respondents indicated that they would not move from the BlackBerry to the iPhone within their enterprise in the near future and there are many reasons. Something as simple as the lack of a replaceable battery could have a huge impact on those that have to support the iPhone but that pales in comparison to how one installs software on the device.
In order to add software to the iPhone, the application needs to be hosted on the iTunes Application store on one of Apple’s servers. This means anyone interested in distributing software to the device needs to first upload the application to a server outside of their secure network and then ask everyone to download it from outside their secure environment as well. Not going to happen.
But I would say the biggest hurdles are the cost of the infrastructure and the existing contractual commitments currently in place. People have staked their jobs on the hardware/software decisions they’ve made while carriers aren’t likely to let enterprises out of long-term service contracts without serious penalties.
These hurdles aren’t insurmountable over time. I would bet the farm that Steve Jobs is currently reinventing the way large enterprises manage mobile devices and the software on them from his office in Cupertino. While he is doing this, contracts will run out and decisions will need to be made but that won’t be for quite some time yet.
Ultimately what ended up happening with both the iPhone launch and our brush with McCoys Chute was a lot of rolling, splashing, noise, hype and excitement. We all bounced around, even lost a few people overboard, but we made it through with greater resolve and more confidence that we could take the next set of rapids, and the next, and the next, and come out unscathed – we have no choice, we’ve chosen our path.
