Enterprise and Silverlight on the iPhone

Over at Loosely Coupled, Tim Marman has organized some thoughts on the iPhone's increasingly capable role in the enterprise community as well as the potential of Microsoft's Silverlight on the iPhone. Marman, with a strong background in enterprise technology and application development, offers up some interesting food for thought on the pair.

The article suggests that with it's recently announced updates geared towards the enterprise community (which are coming iPhone Software 2.0, currently a closed beta available only to approved developers), Apple is trying to accommodate businesses which are moving increasingly to a "bring your own device" model when it comes to employee mobile phones and PDAs.

Though many have scoffed at the significance of Silverlight on the iPhone, depending on who you are asking, Silverlight may be an important addition, especially to the enterprise community. In regards to the prospect of Silverlight on the iPhone, Marman says

It shouldn't be surprising then that most enterprises don't actually do a lot of internal Flash development. The vast majority of enterprises are Windows-based so they don't do much COCOA development either. Especially in the financial world, there is much more .NET development being done than work in either of the aforementioned platforms. And while Silverlight is often positioned as "just a Flash competitor", it is important to remember that it also brings a full, extremely lightweight .NET runtime.

Head to Loosely Coupled to read the full article on the coming enterprise and Silverlight related changes on the iPhone, entitled The Enterprise, The iPhone, and the Role of Silverlight.