AT&T: 40% of iPhones are used for work
updated 04:10 pm EDT, Thu May 27, 2010
ATT says iPhone as good as BlackBerry for business
Four out of 10 iPhones on AT&T are being sold to enterprise workers, the carrier's Business Solutions chief Ron Spears said at the Barclays conference today. Companies now see Apple's phone as a computer and often as secure as a BlackBerry for at least some employees. The iPhone 3GS was needed for hardware encryption, but the majority of the protection was due to software changes that came with iPhone 3.0.
Spears added that AT&T has its own set of internal iPhone apps and uses these to track finance and other components of the business. Other companies are even deciding against handing out corporate notebooks as the iPhone may sometimes do enough at a much lower price.
"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... the lifecycle costs of keeping up with the laptop?"
The AT&T executive was asked about Android, but noted he hadn't seen it used in enterprise-sized business and that it was much more focused on home users. It may eventually come but would be part of an overall change in the work world rather some concentrated push from Google.
