Analyst: Better Corporate Email Support Coming to the iPhone

According to American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu, Apple may just introduce better support for business e-mail solutions on its iPhone quite soon. Client-server, collaborative applications such as Lotus Notes and Exchange were mentioned in his Thursday report.

Analyst Shaw Wu wrote the prediction in his latest note to clients, which describes well known desktop-integrated client options (for accessing business e-mail, calendars and applications) as a possibility among Apple's plans with the handset:

"Even before the iPhone was launched, our concern was its mediocre corporate email support even though it had strong consumer email capability (Yahoo Mail, Gmail, .Mac, AOL mail). Our concern stemmed partially from Exchange's lukewarm support of Macs (understandably so as Microsoft needs to defend its Windows franchise)," the analyst notes.

Citing his own sources, Shaw Wu claims that "months of beta testing" will resolve this weakness, through improvements to the iPhone's ability to work with servers such as Exchange's and IBM's Lotus Domino:

"What isn't as clear to us is how Apple will accomplish this, whether this is from internal development (most likely), third-parties including MSFT (next likely) with its ActiveSync technology, or RIM Blackberry Connect (possible but less likely), or a combination of two or more," Wu predicts.

Improved security is also among Wu's predictions, as far as Virtual Private Networks go, as well as for enterprise applications such as Customer Relationship Management systems.

"We still have high conviction that Apple will ship 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008. To a degree, what gives us confidence is the large number of hacked phones signaling strong intrinsic demand," Wu wrote.

Noting for the billionth time that Apple is planning to finally release its software development kit for the iPhone this week (in one form or another), we (as well as Wu) will be able to answer some of the questions still floating around like blobs of oil in a bucket of water. More so with Apple's confirming the 3G iPhone as well (since we know it's only a matter of time really).

Via Macworld