Companies Shed Initial Resistance to iPhone 3

Companies that don't support the iPhone say they are inhibited for several reasons. Antenna Software specializes in products that help companies manage mobile devices. In December, the company released results of a survey of its customers in which 49% of respondents said the biggest barrier is the fact that AT&T (T) is the only U.S. service provider. Among respondents, 40% said they are concerned about the increased costs of supporting another mobile device. About one-third of respondents wanted better tools to manage the device, like shutting off such features as the camera or the ability to do a remote wipe of data if the phone were lost. While Apple has made it easy to download apps, it's a little bit trickier for IT departments that want to update hundreds or thousands of devices at a time—that was a concern for about 22% of respondents. "One of the big challenges for Apple is that they don't have a good story around mobile device management," says Stephen Drake, program vice-president at IDC. Forrester's Schadler says that Kraft has encountered problems with calendar synchronization.

Still, Avaya is mostly pleased with the devices. "The iPhones are a bit expensive [to operate]," says Avaya's Loo. "The majority of the expense is in the data plan, not in the voice side of it; but we're pretty satisfied with what we have right now." Apple has said it will address some outstanding issues with iPhone 3.0 this summer, but it declined to elaborate for this story.

Yet those issues aren't stopping some companies, such as IT consulting firm Dimension Data from supporting it. When iPhone 2.0 was released, the Dimension Data Americas region, with 1,000 employees, was quick to support it. Darren Augi, vice-president for IT, was the first iPhone user within the corporation, followed closely by CEO Jere Brown and CTO Mark Slaga. About 100 employees at Dimension Data Americas now use iPhones.

Augi says he'd made a hobby out of testing new mobile devices. "I had been looking for the perfect device for a long time," he says, but would often discard them in favor of the next new thing. That changed last year when Apple released iPhone 2.0. "Nothing has lured me away from it yet," he says. "It's the best device I've ever worked with—I don't see leaving it."