An AT&T executive recently claimed that four out of every 10 iPhones the company sells go to enterprise users, according to a ZDNet report. Speaking at the Barclays Capital Communications, Media and Technology conference, Ron Spears, CEO of AT&T’s Business Solutions unit made several comments regarding the iPhone, including its transition to an enterprise-ready device. “Four out of 10 sales of the iPhone are made to enterprise users,” Spears explained. “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… by the time the 3G came out in ‘08 they had solved about 80% of the security issues.” Spears also provided a glimpse into how AT&T itself uses the iPhone for company business. “Most of our monthly reporting is all built into an app that gets updated when our systems get updated, and we do an automatic fetch,” he said. “And any time I want to look at where we sort of sit from a financial point of view in ABS, it now resides on my iPhone as an app. So it starts to change the way you think about governing your business. It changes the speed with which you can make decisions.”
Charles Starrett
Charles Starrett was a senior editor at iLounge. He's been covering the iPod, iPhone, and iPad since their inception. He has written numerous articles and reviews, and his work has been featured in multiple publications.