The iBone may have made the telco industry "cool" in the author's local winebar, but the reality of the market is a million miles away. Sun is, as usual nowadays, years behind the market. Blackberry, with a complete stack including a range of its own secure devices, has been punting application tie-ins via BES with companies like SAP, Siebel, Salesforce.con and Onyx for years, yet there has been little interest from the market for the simple reason that companies are not keen on having their confidential data out there in the field where it is at risk of being stolen or accidentally lost, with subsequent legal implications. And that's with the tried-and-trusted security of BES, the established relationship with just about every telco on the planet, and without the limitations of the iBone (no remote wipe, no encryption), a better solution than Sun has cobbled together. This is shown clearly by the fact that Sun is releasing their "solution" for "free", as they know how far behind the game they are.

Security concerns have not prevented the growth of the enterprise mobility market. IDC currently forecasts that for mobile middleware alone, the market will increase to 1.5 billion dollars in 2011. Combining two-factor authentication for users, data encryption and remote wipe is more than enough to give companies peace of mind about the security of their data. Furthermore, it’s possible to allow mobile workers access to sensitive company data – as well as the ability to modify it – without ever downloading it to the devices in question.

While these options may not all currently be possible using iPhone, iPhone as a business tool is very much a work-in-progress, and should not be taken as representative of the market in general. As the article correctly states, field service, logistics and sales force automation are massive markets for mobile apps – however, essentially all organisations with a sizeable mobile workforce could potentially stand to benefit.

"and it has included high-level security protection based on SSL and Triple DES encryption"

I just almost spit my coffee out after reading "secure" and "Triple DES" in the same sentence. Please, can't we just dump the thing and switch to AES? DES isn't secure, adding three layers of DES doesn't sound like safe to me.

Other than that, Sun's proposal seems interesting ... except Blackberry's BES seems to have taken over this market already. They do use Java, so that at least does give Sun some credit.

Matt Bryant suggests, "a better solution than Sun has cobbled together. This is shown clearly by the fact that Sun is releasing their 'solution' for 'free', as they know how far behind the game they are."

I wonder if this individual had considered that SUN had been an Open System vendor (building around freely available standards & offering freely available specifications to standards) from it's founding days and has been open-sourcing everything in recent history: from CPU (highest throughput single socket and dual socket performance) to Firmware (leveraged by alternative vendors) to OS (Solaris considered an excellent platform by the industry) to virtualization (Xen code shipped by multiple vendors and now by SUN) to desktop environment (from their days when they moved from Sunview to X Windows) to Middleware (JAVA is used as the basis for multiple vendor applications and middleware layers) to Applications (OpenOffice is leveraged by the millions of users)?

Considering this company has always been an Open Systems Vendor, from their very first days - any comment suggesting that they are releasing a product for "free" because of some unspecified "problem" demonstrates a poor understanding of the company, it's history, and the continual demonstration of their committment to Open Systems.

Such a rhetorical conclusion is not worth it's weight in virtual ink, casting any statement offered earlier in the light of most likely being poorly reasoned.

Don't put any effort toward Matt. Your conclusion that Matt's statement is "poorly reasoned" misses the fact that Matt does not use reason. Matt uses bias. Bias against Sun and any other solution that Matt does not understand.

Matt Bryant suggests, "without the limitations of the iBone (no remote wipe, no encryption)"

You spelled iPhone incorrectly.

You are also incorrect concerning Apple including Remote Wipe in their iPhone.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/enterprise/

"Features include: ... Remote wipe"

As a side note about encryption - Apple has included encryption capabilities

http://www.apple.com/iphone/enterprise/integration.html

"Built into every iPhone is a robust VPN client that supports Cisco IPSec, L2TP over IPSec, and PPTP and is intuitive to configure."

It seems the supporting details you posted are faulty.