The iPhone’s Great Email Debate

Posted by Nick Wingfield

Since it rolled out an array of business-friendly features last week for the iPhone last week, Apple has touched off a furious debate among acronym-loving, geek-speaking advocates of two approaches to wireless email. A new report today weighs in on the discussion.

The two camps might best be described as NOC hawks and ActiveSync activists. A NOC is a network operations center, and it’s a key element of Research In Motion’s method of delivering wireless email to its millions of BlackBerry customers . Emails sent to BlackBerries hopscotch through a series of conduits, from a company’s corporate email server to a piece of software called BlackBerry Enterprise Server to RIM’s NOC in Canada, which connects to hundreds of wireless carriers who then transmit the messages on to BlackBerries wherever they are in the world.

Last week, Apple CEO Steve Jobs knocked the NOC-approach to delivering email. He pointed out that RIM’s NOC occasionally goes down and, with it, wireless email for BlackBerry users. Jobs also suggested that technology managers should be concerned about the potential for snooping on company communications presented by a centralized NOC. “Why aren’t CIOs worried about security?” Jobs asked.

Instead, Apple licensed a technology from Microsoft called ActiveSync that will allow companies to deliver email directly from their Exchange email servers to iPhones used by their employees, bypassing a NOC.

There are good reasons, though, that BlackBerry has had so much success with its comparatively complex approach. Analyst Shaw Wu of American Technology Research in a research note today lays out some of the advantages to having a NOC handle wireless email. Some pluses include better security since a company doesn’t have to open up a hole in their firewall to deliver email and resistance to denial of services attacks by hackers, Wu writes in the report.

Wu says there are advantages to Apple’s NOC-less approach too, which he says is “much simpler and cheaper from a management standpoint.”

“We believe that AAPL has a stronger services story and has the best in class user-interface design,” Wu concluded. “We believe that RIMM has a stronger enterprise story and the best efficient design expertise.”

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