IPhone features slowly woo enterprise skeptics

e-mail server and forwards those e-mails in an encrypted tunnel to one of the NOCs --as "a full-fledged necessary component of the overall mobile device risk management solution."

Dulaney shares Storms' view that the NOC is a feather in RIM's cap, because it lets the company connect its BlackBerry devices to hundreds of wireless carriers around the world. While he acknowledges that the iPhone's more direct approach to sending e-mail may be less expensive than BlackBerry's NOC approach, he notes that the iPhone is limited by the fact that it uses only one carrier in the United States (AT&T), whereas BlackBerry is supported by all four U.S. major carriers (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile) and hundreds of carriers worldwide. Global companies that have to rely on multiple carriers for their services should stick with the BlackBerry as their standard enterprise wireless device, he says.

Another advantage that RIM still has over the iPhone, says Yankee Group analyst Nate Dyer, is that Apple has traditionally been a consumer-oriented company and hasn't yet branched out enough to create partnerships with vendors in the enterprise mobile platform ecosystem. A new Yankee Group study, for instance, shows that the iPhone has "little-to-no" partnerships among systems integrators and has "minimal" partnerships with application vendors, hardware vendors and mobile operators. The BlackBerry and Microsoft's Windows Mobile on the other hand, had either "positive" or "strong" partnerships with hardware and applications vendors, mobile operators and systems integrators.

"Granted, it's still early days of Apple's enterprise strategy, but it still takes years to cultivate these partnerships," Dyer says.

But even with these drawbacks, Dyer thinks the iPhone has a bright future in enterprise. While it may never have the thoroughness of RIM's security infrastructure or its broad access to hundreds of carriers worldwide, he sees a definite trend toward more businesses adopting popular consumer devices for their workers. And though the iPhone may not be for every company, he says its high-quality mobile Internet browsing experience could make it particularly popular for mobile workers who need travel information, corporate e-mail access and even regular traffic reports. As more workers look to bring popular consumer devices to work with them, he says, IT departments will have to figure out ways to accommodate them.

"IT departments can't just ignore this behavior; they have to adapt to it," he says. "It's important to point out that there's a significant rise in consumer tools that are used for business purposes... enterprise technology departments have been guilty for several years of putting IT's needs ahead of the user's, and I think it's time for them to think more about how to make the user experience easier."

Storms, however, has yet to be fully convinced and is taking a more skeptical approach to the iPhone's potential as a corporate device.

Whatever might happen, myself like hundreds of other security managers reached out to our user base [last week]," he writes. "We all sent the predictable e-mail out to the entire company reminding them that... the iPhone still is not yet an approved device."