Oracle Launches iPhone Apps For BusinessOracle Launches iPhone Apps For Business

Trying to figure out how to justify the company paying for Apple's new 3G iPhone? Oracle wants to help.

Oracle became the first major business software vendor to deliver applications for the iPhone, joining hundreds of software developers, many of them tiny or consumer-oriented, hawking wares at Thursday's opening of Apple's online App Store.

Oracle's Business Indicators applications let users of several Oracle business intelligence applications get information sent to their iPhones. Finance, sales, and manufacturing managers can get alerts and updates based on predefined business metrics, such as if sales goals are met or shipment levels dip.

The mobile apps are free to Oracle BI customers, and data can be viewed in graphical or tabular format. Oracle plans to broaden the line to include apps that let managers make approvals -- for things such as new hires or expense reports -- using their phones. It's also promising apps that bring capabilities from its CRM software, such as contact management and sales forecasting, to iPhones.

Oracle isn't the first to develop BI capabilities for the iPhone. Information Builders has provided iPhone access to its BI reports running on servers for months, and open source BI vendor Pentaho last week announced a similar capability. On-demand ERP vendor NetSuite provides iPhone access to data in its systems.

Apple is trying to push the iPhone further into business. The 3G iPhone, to be released on Friday amid the now typical sleep-on-the-sidewalk anticipation, supports Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync for pushing e-mail, calendars, and contacts to the devices. It has the ability to view Word and Excel attachments within e-mails, and Apple offers a secure Cisco-based VPN into corporate networks. Apple released a software development kit for the iPhone earlier this year; its first application store coincides with the 3G launch.

But the iPhone hasn't entirely proved itself as an effective tool for accessing enterprise data. Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney cautions against the iPhone for enterprise apps, citing Apple's lack of infrastructure and support for corporate customers. SAP demonstrated iPhone access to its CRM 2007 app last year, but hasn't yet delivered anything. iPhone support will come when the "the time is right," said an SAP spokesman, noting that the iPhone isn't a pressing priority. "We see a lot of potential there, but the BlackBerry is the gold standard," the spokesman said. In May, SAP announced co-develoment of a CRM app that runs natively on the BlackBerry.

Oracle wants in on the iPhone action. Its developers began building for the iPhone when they noticed managers bypassing company-approved smartphones for iPhones, said Lenley Hensarling, Oracle group VP of applications development. Rather than try to wring special treatment out of the consumer-oriented Apple to replicate the Oracle app appearance, Oracle worked with Apple's software development kit. It didn't try to figure out "how can [Apple] help us render our model to the iPhone," said Hensarling.

With Oracle Business Indicators, everything users access is running on an Oracle BI server, which pushes metrics based on employee roles. But that's only alerts based on preset data, not full BI capabilities like running queries as a manager might do from a desktop.

For Oracle, it's a good way to get basic BI functionality out to iPhone users. Hear that call? It's iPhone-toting employees calling IT to see if their companies use Oracle BI servers.