The iPhone is turning into a business toolThe iPhone is turning into a business tool

When I think about Apple technology for business, that means the Macintosh product line. iPods and iPhones are consumer electronics, with little relationship to business. Right? Wrong.Certainly theres precedent for thinking about business applications of mobile phones, as every BlackBerry or Trio user knows.

While many of the iPhones features certainly are consumer electronics, like the MP3 player, the full-featured Safari Web browser is capable of accessing unmodified enterprise Web applications. That makes the iPhone (and the WiFi-based iPod Touch) business-friendly for people who need to access browser-based apps, but who dont want to carry or deploy a notebook PC.

Yes, many other mobile phones have Web browsers. Theres one in my BlackBerry. However, for the most part, the connections are so slow, the displays so poor, and the experience so terrible that theyre to be avoided. You certainly wouldnt consider the Web browser within a BlackBerry to be a viable business tool. What makes that mobile device successful is its tight integration with enterprise mail services.

While the iPhone is good at accessing public Web sites (like Google, Amazon.com or bMighty) and hosted Software-as-a-Service (like Salesforce.com), its been challenged by enterprise firewalls. That barrier is being broken thanks to new VPN features offered by Astaro, a security threat-management company.

Astaro says that its VPN appliances now support the iPhone, and that Set up and configuration is easy requiring as little as five clicks to create VPN access on the Astaro side. The Astaro Security Gateway offers four different levels of road warrior VPN; SSL, IPSec, L2TP over IPSec, and PPTP. The Apple iPhone is compatible with two of these, (L2TP over IPSec and PPTP) offering users a choice in which VPN access to use.

Now, lets see what type of business case I can make for the iPod nano. Hmm