Gartner, arguably one of the most respected research firms globally has given the iPhone the big OK for use by big companies for their applications.
The link above is kindly provided by Cebit, we are presenting soon at Cebit 2008 and we won the coveted platinum excellence in innovation award there last year.
We commented recently and accurately in this blog on the earth shattering impact of the iPhone web access demonstrated with hard numbers, so this endorsement by Gartner is no surprise to the team here at saasu but it is a huge green light for businesses all around the world, not just the big end of town.
This is another reason saasu made the right decision getting the current release of saasu working on the apple itouch (ipod that looks like iphone but without the phone). See the saasu netaccounts on iphone demo video a happy saasu customer made even before we announced it.
It is also why the new release of saasu includes integration with google maps and hundreds of millions of people’s profiles on the big Professional and Social Networking (PSN) sites. More on that tomorrow.
The whole world is getting more saas-y, not just the big end of town. Now you can run your multi country business on your iphone with the SaaS Ecosystem including Saasu.
For an industry segment that used to be geek central, most of our new sales are now from non-tech firms and non-tech people in those firms.
On a lighter note we now also have a potential theme movie for the Saas industry – Saas Girl or similar in name at least – is about to be released, watch the saasy girl trailer.
We are also working on a marketing idea for saas girl and saas guy but more on that later, anticipation is half the fun.
At this rate, the iPhone/iPod platform should be the third largest computing platform by the end of 2008.
This was the dramatic claim in one recent article backed up by some semi decent statistics. This is only one view but the calcs we did below do show that allowing for three factors -
- time on market,
- handsets sold and
- % of web browsing done
Apple’s iPhone/iTouch is killing Microsoft Windows CE in the mobile web application usage and adoption.
In fact they are more than 87 times more effective at driving customer usage which is the ultimate test. What a great testimony to usability and one of the reasons more than 90% of our saasu.com features (by use) are available within one click.
To really understand how good it is, watch a video or two on the apple site.
Here at Saasu.com, we like mobile access, a lot. Not everyone needs it and most people won’t use it as their main platform ever. But it is useful and for many segments such as mobile professionals and service segments it is a major productivity jump.
We have been quietly working on mobile capabilities here at Saasu.com and had our stuff working the iphone/itouch some months ago. We wanted to tweak a bit more before announcing it but as usual in this ‘youtube.com democracy age’ our clients who are real fans of saasu beat us to it.
We are also launching some special extensions next year to support mobile financial management across platforms. Sign up for the blog feed so you see it when it arrives.
Rough calculations follow (from above article and related links) -
TOM – Time On Market
- Apple iphone 5 months, itouch 3 months
- Microsoft Windows 10+ years but we will assume 18months to allow for ramp up etc..
Footprint – Handsets/devices sold
Web Browsing Market Share
- Apple iPhone 0.09%, iTouch 0.01%
- MS Windows CE 0.06%
Weighting the three factors, the effectiveness in shaping consumer adoption is Apple 18/5 * 20/1.4 * 0.1/0.06 = 3.6 * 14.3 * 1.7 = 87+
Footnote: In Australia our home base, the iPhone is not officially available yet but the iTouch is being marketed heavily for Xmas and there are a fair few US imports that have been modified (hacked is probably a better term) to provide most of the features here (not visual voice mail for example however).
