Apple says it is poised to extend the reach of its red-hot iPhone into the enterprise space. CEO Steve Jobs recently told ABC News that Apple has followed through on business user requests for push e-mail, calendar and contacts capabilities, compatibility with Microsoft Exchange, and various defense features lost from the original iPhone.

“On the enterprise side, Apple has taken a huge step forward for kind of ticking off all of the boxes that enterprises want, from Cisco VPN to wiping the device remotely,” said Carolina Milanesi, Gartner research director. “They are basically executing what they had promised to do.”

Enhancing Productivity

Achieving growth in the enterprise space is an fundamental component of Apple’s plan for meeting its 10 million iPhone sales target for 2008. Though the company still has much work to do to invent the iPhone an enterprise hit, Jobs says Apple has already laid the groundwork.

“The business world has bought a

lot of iPhones in the last year,” with the “CEOs and senior executives in most of the Fortune 500 companies already having iPhones of their own,” Jobs told ABC News. “And there are a lot of employees that have them at home, and they really want to use them at work.”

For enterprises, productivity is key. Apple noted that the speed of its new iPhone is twice as fast by 3G than by the EDGE wireless technology featured in its original iPhone. “My impression is that it’s going to be able to handle enterprise applications more quickly,” said Rena Bhattacharyya, IDC research manager.

Having that 3G capability on an iPhone “is a good thing for countries where wireless LAN is not as pervasive as in the United States,” Milanesi noted. “There are plenty of places” where workers “really need the speed of 3G considering they can’t fall back on Wi-Fi,”…

Orginal post by Top Tech News