apple is in the enterprise

The need for IT support within the Enterprise is an interesting topic as some people believe that as more tech aware employees (Gen Y?) enter the workforce the need for IT support will shrink. We’ve all ready read about how the voice strategy is influenced by the users, but it’s now becoming clear that users are setting the agenda for mobile handset choice too.

If you step back a few years a corporate handset was a pretty basic Nokia handset (remember the 6310i) that was pretty much on a par with what consumers bought as well (I remember having two 6310i’s).

Now there’s a huge choice in the consumer space with devices such as the iPhone 4 and the HTC Desire which are very high spec devices. So when an employer hands over a blackberry curve or a Nokia E72 a lot of employees struggle with why they should use for a large portion of the day a device that is inferior to their own.

These high spec smart phones are capable of performing all the same tasks as the blackberry and they are at a price point were consumer adoption is high so the users flip the simcards around and bingo they are now able to use the handset they want in the Enterprise.

There’s two interesting elements to this, Apple is forging ahead almost by stealth into the enterprise without even trying and secondly it’s continuing the trend that we are now seeing that IT services and now hardware is heavily influenced by it’s users.

As I’m writing this news comes in that Apple may be moving on from the stealth approach, Apple is rumored to be poaching Enterprise Sales staff from RIM, makers of the Blackberry.

Also posted at Orange Business Live

ipad in the enterprise part 2

I wrote a little while back about Apple’s expected success with iPad in the consumer space and I asked the question if it’d march into the enterprise as well.

The answer is yes; I for one have one and wrote this post on it using wiriting tool such as plaintext to write the post, which then syncs withdropbox which allows me to access my documents from the cloud.

I know of at least 5 other people with them in a reasonable sized office, which isn’t a huge amount, but we never saw the same traction with netbooks in the enterprise which was the last big change in computing.

The reason people are giving for adopting them is for when they travel, the MS Exchange capabilities allows them to read and reply to email on a decent sized screen with a battery life that’s way beyond any laptop. The upside is the same device allows users to read, listen to music or watch movies too.

Also posted at Orange Business Live

why does the skype generation accept a lower quality of voice?

It’s an interesting paradox; Skype offers a pretty amazing level of call quality, which is the reason why it’s often used in recording Podcasts. An example being the TWiT network, Leo Leporte uses Skype to conference in his guests and the quality is great.

I’ve seen the phrase used a coupe of times now, but most recently to justify lower investment in voice infrastructure. The generation that uses Skype is also the generation that has grown up using mobile phones as their main form of communication. The call quality can be a bit shaky due to a myriad of reasons, but people have accepted the convience in substitution of quality.

Having tried Jajah, Rebtel, Skype, Truphone, services that use the internet as the voice backbone, I can say that about 80% of the time the call quality is really good, but there’s 20% of the time the quality is horrific, delays, calling dropping, strange noises etc. Compare this to traditional voice where you knew when you picked up the phone it was going to work 100% of the time, (even in a power outage).

Today we have lots of different ways of communicating, IM, Facebook, Twitter, SMS, email (through a variety of devices), so if voice doesn’t work a quick SMS, email or Tweet often get’s the message across. So we accept lower quality voice because there are other forms of communication not just voice.

So the Skype generation is in fact very communications savvy, they have lots of communications tools and have lowered the cost to almost free. What we’ve learnt here is that as predicted the IT strategy of anEnterprise is becoming heavily influenced by the users, as they bring with them products and services that work for them.

Also posted at Orange Business Live