Mobile operator Vodafone sold 100,000 iPhones within a week of last month's launch, of which between 20-25 per cent were sold to business customers, according to Enterprise Director Peter Kelly. Unlike its competitors, Vodafone has heavily promoted the iPhone as a business tool as well as a consumer device. Last month the company invited Enterprise customers to a glitzy launch event where the guest of honour was F1 World Champion Jensen Button.

"The iPhone is absolutely a business tool and it's now on a business grade network," stated Kelly. "Originally, iPhone was strongly positioned and sold as a consumer product. It's strengths were social networking, gaming and music. A lot has happened in the last 12-18 months, and a lot has been driven by the business applications available. Now you can get Salesforce.com and Cisco's Webex on the App Store. The iPhone drives new ways of working and allows us to drive mobile applications that previously would have been more difficult to deploy on some of the earlier smartphones."

Crossover from the consumer market has fed demand at all levels, particularly with small businesses, but Kelly believes that Apple has succeeded in making its flagship phone appealing to corporates with its software updates. "There have also been a lot of incremental improvements, said Kelly. "While the hardware and basic operating system have remained the same, advancements in security have been important. The iPhone has all the security abilities like password control, lock and wipe, VPN proxies and always-on encryption. It's no longer just a consumer play."

Kelly says that Vodafone will help the development and deployment of business apps like Salesforce and Webex. It won't, however, be developing an application for its UC products, Vodafone One and One Net. Kelly said: "We sell One Net as a service and customers buy that capability of one number, one voicemail etc. iPhone will work with that."

Apart from iPhone, Vodafone's new Sure Signal femtocell products are attracting interest from business customers. "We are finding that small businesses, especially where people are in basements or poor coverage areas, are keen to get their hands on Sure Signal," Kelly said. "When you do Sure Signal in parallel with an exciting device like iPhone, people's eyes are opening."