Rachael King writes at Businessweek:
Wells Fargo spent two years studying the iPhone before letting bankers use the device at work. Apple’s iPad, released in April, took just weeks to get cleared.
This time around, safeguards against security breaches are stronger from the start, according to Megan Minich, a senior vice-president at the San Francisco-based bank. Her colleagues used two of the first shipment of 15 iPads to demonstrate financial products at an investor conference in May. More are on the way, Minich says. “We’ve got a bunch ordered that we can’t get yet,” she says in an interview.
While banks may not be the flavour of the month with right-minded individuals in the western world, the adoption of modern technology is welcome. Many of the websites at the bank where I worked would only function with Internet Explorer 6 and there wasn’t much movement to update them to modern, secure browsers.
Apple has a real opportunity here to gain even more mindshare. And it starts to prove a point that I believe is crucial to the adoption of platforms in the modern world. The platforms will be pushed by the users not dictated by IT experts.
The same goes for Rob Enslin, North America president at SAP, the world’s largest maker of business-management software. Enslin says that when he travels, the only device he carries besides a Research In Motion BlackBerry is the iPad. “It’s allowed me to almost run a paperless office,” says Enslin, who uses it to access business applications, briefing documents, customer information, and other data.
This is the sort of soundbite which Apple loves – one that could only be improved on by the executive gushing about videoconferencing with FaceTime. I’ve been using the iPad as a main machine for a few weeks now and while there are times I enjoy a keyboard and a massive screen with multiple visible apps, I can cope well with the iPad as is. I still believe that some of the insanely great software for the iPad is still to be developed but these reports from Wells-Fargo and SAP show that the software may exist – but it may not exist on the AppStore if they can secure enterprise app distribution with their customers. And why not.
Some companies may also be reluctant to entrust their data to the iPad after a breach on the AT&T website revealed the e-mail addresses of as many as 114,000 iPad users.
This sentence ruins a nice piece. A breach on the AT&T web site has nothing to do with the security of the iPad itself. I have asked the author to amend this because, frankly, it’s nonsense.