The latest batch of smartphone and tablet devices make integration into an existing enterprise environment difficult.
One of the challenging areas is applications…
The concept of an App Store is hugely beneficial for consumers. It completely hides the underlying complexity of software installation, and goes some way to evening the playing field for software development bodies of all sizes.
However it is a headache in an Enterprise environment used to dictating which applications are allowed on devices.
I think that there is an opportunity here for Apple and others to address this is an elegant and simple way.
What is needed is the ability to create an Enterprise App Store that contains a subset of the total available applications, along with a policy management agent on each device.
Additionally an Enterprise should be able to publish apps to the App Store that appear only in their Enterprise App Store.
An Enterprise could then adopt one of two approaches:
1. Allow users to install any app they wanted from the app store, but point them to the Enterprise App store for supported, corporate apps
2. Restrict devices to allow only the apps that are in the Enterprise App store
With these elements in place, one of the big challenges that Enterprises face in deploying and managing smartphones and tablets would be removed.
