Are Apple and RIM morphing into each other?

The iPhone is increasingly seen as a business tool

The battle lines between Apple and Research In Motion (RIM) were always neatly delineated. Apple's iPhone was a purely a consumer venture, while the BlackBerry took the lion's share of business and enterprise accounts.

However, the goalposts have moved in the past three years, and both companies are cannibalising each other's market space. RIM is slowly moving into the consumer smart device space, and Apple's iPhone and iPad have surprisingly been heralded as genuine business tools.

Analyst firm Gartner can be held at least partly accountable for corporate hesitance towards iPhone deployment among employees. Back in 2007, analyst Ken Dulaney issued a withering statement about the iPhone's chances in the business space.

"We're telling IT executives not to support it because Apple has no intention of supporting iPhone use in the enterprise. This is basically a cellular iPod with some other capabilities, and it's important that it be recognised as such, " he said.

While the iPhone was locked exclusively into O2 in the UK, the BlackBerry was available on a host of carriers, including T-Mobile, Vodafone, O2, Orange and Virgin. This helped to give RIM a saturated market, and left Apple virtually missing out in smartphone market share.

However, Apple was working on something for 2008 that would change the way users and corporates thought about iPhones.

On 6 March 2008, Apple announced plans to release the software developer kit (SDK) for the iPhone, and teased that it would have "some exciting new enterprise features".

The features turned out to be Apple's licensing Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync for the iPhone. This gave the iPhone wireless push mail and the ability to connect directly to enterprise mail servers. Apple was making all the right noises to entice businesses, with buzz words like 'reliability' and 'security' ringing out loud and clear.

The iPhone now had hardware encryption and secure access to corporate VPN servers and Wi-Fi networks. It was an impressive first stab at corporate credibility for Apple.

The release of the SDK also turned out to have an even bigger impact than Apple had imagined. It opened up the floodgates for third-party developers to create business applications for the iPhone.