iPhone Gets High Marks For Accessing On-Demand Software

The Apple iPhone is not sold as a business device, yet some small companies have found it useful in accessing customer, sales and financial data on at least one software-as-a-service vendor.

NetSuite has worked with Apple for several years in getting the latter company's Safari Web browser to work well with NetSuite's on-demand customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and e-commerce software, Sean Rollings, senior director of product marketing for NetSuite, told InformationWeek Thursday.

While Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer have fully supported NetSuite, Safari has lagged behind, primarily because it has not always supported the latest technologies, such as DHTML, advanced JavaScript, cascading style sheets, and Ajax, Rollings said. With the latest version of Safari, which ships with the iPhone, all that has changed.

The browser today is capable of giving NetSuite customers, who tend to be small and medium-sized businesses with 50 to 500 employees, full access to their vendor's services. Because the iPhone has a large screen for a small device, it makes a good mobile computer for NetSuite customers. "The thing that really sets it apart is the large size screen, and the large, crisp browser," Rollings said.

Mort O'Sullivan, president of privately held ArcaTech Systems in Mebane, N.C., is the first, and only, person, in his 45-employee company to use the iPhone with NetSuite. "It wasn't intended as a business device, but it seems to work better than other phones in using NetSuite," O'Sullivan said. "It's like years better."NetSuite customer Brad Kugler, chief executive for Distribution Video and Audio near Tampa, Fla., agreed. "I expected to have an iPhone for fun; I'm sort of an Apple fanatic," he said. "But it works beautifully for NetSuite."

Brian Keare, chief operating officer for Circle of Friends, a small Santa Monica, Calif., supplier of children bath products, tested his iPhone on NetSuite and was pleasantly surprised. "I was hopeful that it would work well, but I was taking a risk," Keare said. "It ended up working better than I had hoped it would."

The small screen requires NetSuite customers to use the iPhone's zoom in and zoom out tools to read data. Also, drop down menus used when accessing through a desktop browser are replaced with scroll wheels. "There are certain things it does differently, but it offers the same functionality as I've seen on my Mac," Keare said.

While the iPhone can access e-mail from Circle of Friends' Microsoft Exchange server, it can't synchronize with the calendar and address book, Keare said. Nevertheless, the company has found the iPhone useful enough to make plans to buy a couple more for the members of the executive team.

O'Sullivan and Kugler do not have any immediate plans to distribute the iPhone to other employees. Among the issues is the lack of a business plan offered by AT&T, which is the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the U.S. A company employee would have to buy the device, and then expense the bill every month, which would just generate more paperwork for accounting departments. "If they offered this phone to business customers, it would be a very easy decision," O'Sullivan said.0