Analysis: Is Apple about to have an enterprise moment?

What this would wind up looking like: all employees have company-issued iphones (or iphone-like devices, if more form factors become available), company-issued apple laptops, and there's a couple xserves in a closet somewhere.

The xserves give the company integrated calendaring-and-task-management that just works, along with a platform for running whatever internal webapps, file serving, and related tasks.

The iphones are smoothly synced up to the company calendar, and possibly are running some in-house applications (eg: for a logistics company, the data-entry software the delivery guys use to note when and where stuff got delivered). Because these iphones are company-issued the company has some backdoors to the iphone's drm layer; this adds a layer of security to the devices in the event that an employee loses the phone and/or attempts to go rogue.

The laptops play nice with everything else.

Currently you can cobble together an equivalently-functional system with a combination of exchange, blackberries or windows mobile devices, and a lot of custom development and system integration; this is very doable once you're large enough to have a dedicated IT staff, but is often out of reach for small-or-midsize businesses.

Apple would like to be able to make this a turnkey system: you pays your money, and get an integrated phone/email/calendaring/collaboration environment; plug it in, set it up, and you're done, and no more sourcing your combined it-and-telecom services from many different vendors.

Target customers would include schools, medical and professional offices, and anyplace else where there's a huge gain from more-efficient scheduling and communications but not necessarily a lot of ability to develop in-house grade-A technical staff; fortune-500 types might also benefit, but wouldn't be the direct target.

Apple's biggest holdup here is email: they've licensed a lot of what you need to work with exchange, but they don't currently offer any way to run exchange yourself, and they don't have a competing product...ical is nice, but it's not exchange.

Until the email-server issue is sorted out, I can't see apple officially trying to enter this market.

It's worth noting: even in the event this succeeds, the xserve is never going to make sense as a beige-box replacement; it'd just be a major component of an integrated vertical solution.