TUAW Interview: Visto corporate email for iPhone

As much love as we may have and hold for the iPhone, there's a substantial chunk of the market that is resistant to the siren call of this miraculous device: those of us with enterprise email accounts (Exchange or Lotus Notes/Domino) that don't want any part of this shiny yummy new world. This may not be the most serious pushback from enterprise users -- see Tom Yager's scathing review of iPhone for enterprise use for some genuine buzzkill -- but it's a sticky wicket. Yes, both Exchange and Domino can be accessed over IMAP for compatibility with the iPhone's Mail application, but in many BigCorpInc scenarios the IMAP access is blocked for security or performance reasons.

With this in mind, there's a tremendous appetite for a more suave method of accessing enterprise mail, not to mention the calendar and contact data that lies alongside those messages. We've seen the insinuation from Steve that "something's coming" in the next few weeks, and the rumored ActiveSync licensing deal, but only one company has announced a product for enterprise mail on the iPhone: Visto. Update: Commenter 'stickybit' passes along the Synchronica announcement, via iLounge -- that makes 2 companies.

Since the June 28th Visto press release was thin on implementation details of how Visto's solution would work, we've been eager to get more info, and now we have it. I spoke to Haniff Somani, Visto's VP/Chief Architect, earlier this week and got a preview of how Visto's solution will deliver corporate email to the cranky corporate iPhone users.

Somani walked me through Visto's existing Mobile product offering, which is sold to cell carriers, enterprise users and to individuals. The Visto software, running either on a user's Windows PC or on a local server on the enterprise LAN, hands the Exchange or Lotus mail off (via secure SSL transfer) to Visto's systems. "In Visto's datacenter or at the cell carriers, there's a bridge between the enterprise and the device," said Somani. "We are transmitting the mail, not storing the mail at all." A single Windows desktop running the Personal version of Visto's software can handle mail transfer for up to five users, which is helpful both for Mac-centric execs and also for mobile users who can't leave their machines connected and powered up at all hours.

Fine; so we can get mail out of our enterprise via the desktop software and out to Visto, but whence to our iPhones? Visto has a web client for general use and a device-specific offline client for scores of phones, including Symbian, Java and Palm OS devices. "When we can have software running on the device, we utilize a proprietary, end-to-end encrypted protocol on the device. Compared to the other protocols, like IMAP or POP or even ActiveSync, we do a more efficient job of utilizing the over the air traffic," said Somani. The bad news: at this point, with no SDK for native iPhone application development, there's no way for Visto to adapt their client app for the iPhone.

"We would like nothing better than to deliver a native iPhone client," Somani says, but that's not what's going to be in the initial release. Instead, the Visto servers will provide an IMAP front-end for the iPhone Mail application. From the user perspective, working through the iPhone Mail app, "sending and receiving emails, it works just like you were doing these tasks at your desktop. If you read an email, it's marked as read in your enterprise mail environment." At the moment, the Visto solution works on standard 'pull' IMAP, periodically checking in with the servers for new messages. Depending on how Apple and Yahoo! have engineered the 'push' IMAP for Yahoo! Mail (apparently using P-IMAP) it may be possible for Visto to leverage that as well.

What's not in the Visto plan, at least not now, are some of the features that IT managers would like to check off their lists: PIM sync of calendar and contact data over wireless, IT policy enforcement and remote device wipe (a la Blackberry Enterprise Server). Even without those big-ticket capabilities, there should be access to both the corporate directory (GAL) and contact/calendar info via iPhone-custom web portals to Visto's server.

With regard to the rumored ActiveSync license, Somani pointed out one of the limitations of Microsoft's offering: "To have a truly compelling solution, you need to be able to access both Exchange and Domino, and all flavors of Exchange, not just the 2003/2007 versions that support ActiveSync." Since plenty of shops still run with older Exchange environments, that's a valid reason to look elsewhere. Somani also senses the anticipation among business users for a mail solution: "I'm aware of a lot of people -- friends, business associates -- who've purchased an iPhone expecting to use our solution with it. The iPhone is a consumer-driven choice... there's a sense that there might be a sanctioned solution, and there's our solution, and there may be others."

Visto's iPhone product will launch late Q3 with a 60-day free trial, and the final pricing model is TBD. Somani: "It's working well now in internal testing... we haven't seen any major gotchas. We need to decide on the business model." It remains to be seen whether Visto's approach will resonate with business email users, but until we hear more solid news from the other interested parties, it's looking like the only game in town.
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