Apple Banking On iPhone Business Apps

The iPhone has been called the third evolution in computing platforms (mainframes and PCs were the first two), and where Apple’s fortunes are concerned, there had better be a lot of truth — and growth — in that.

Indeed, there isn’t a lot of good news for Apple in its core businesses as its heads into its annual developer conference in a little less than two weeks. Mac sales, which declined last quarter — the first year-over-year decline for Mac sales in six years — seem poised to decline yet again, and noted Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster now says sales of the iPod are set to decline as well.

My colleague Erik Sherman has documented the negative impact of declining Mac sales for Apple, and I’ve argued that this matters less if mobile devices are truly the company’s future. And indeed, if you look at the quarterly numbers filed at the end of March 2009, you can see that the iPhone represents a growing portion of Apple’s revenues, going from 5 percent to 18 percent of the total, year-over-year. Meanwhile, Macs (desktops and portables combined) went from almost half (47%) to a little over a third (36%) of total sales. It’s clear that the iPhone is Apple’s future — and that if it isn’t, based on the Mac’s decline, the company is in a lot of trouble.

But Apple is counting on more than just consumer spending, which would be an iffy proposition at best, which is why it’s putting so much effort into promoting business applications for the iPhone. A recent ad on the back page of The New Yorker magazine features a picture of the iPhone screen with sixteen business apps, including a spreadsheet application, a credit card processing terminal, an app for tracking billable hours, and a tool for tracking a company’s financial information.

Apple also just added a new data visualization application to its store, that re-formats reports from enterprise platforms and systems like those from SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce.com. Santiago Becerra, CEO of Mellmo, the company making the application, told me the one drawback to business mobility has been viewing reports, which he said was “like viewing a laptop screen through a straw.”

In addition to changing the way users view reports, Mellmo takes advantage of the iPhone’s huge storage capability to download entire reports to the device, which makes it easier to scroll through data than with applications that download data as needed. The key here is iPhone’s storage capacity, which is unique and a big reason the device has such promise as a computing platform in its own right.

Becerra, who is well known in the industry for his work in data visualization, told me that while Mellmo doesn’t have a formal relationship with Apple, the two companies have worked closely together and that “Apple is very interested in [establishing a more formal relationship].”

The Mellmo application is made exclusively for iPhones, which means Mellmo is betting its entire business on the success of the iPhone. And Apple is betting a large portion of its business on the success of the iPhone in the business market.