Carl Weinschenk spoke with Ken Dulaney vice president, distinguished analyst at Gartner. Dulaney and Gartner released a research note warning clients to stay away from the iPhone.

Weinschenk: Is the iPhone enterprise-ready?
Dulaney: I think the bottom line is that it is a tremendous innovation on the consumer side. Let's give Apple all the credit in the world. In the business sector there are other issues that come up that need to be investigated. Will work in a business context? It is not considered to be [business-ready] by us. The security is weak. Their VPN is PPTP, which is outmoded today and vulnerable. Many people go with SSL or IPSec which are much better. The method of accessing Exchange is pretty rudimentary. It uses IMAP or an Outlook Web access front end to get to Exchange. Most companies do not want to get into email that way. In fact, the Outlook Web access front end most often is encapsulated in something that Apple does not offer support for. Users may have to redirect to the ISP where it synchs up with email. Enterprises will be concerned about that because it puts email in an unsecured location. Also, Apple is making users sign up for an iTunes account. The question is whether that is something corporations want to do.

Weinschenk: It sounds like they are paying little attention to the enterprise and bypassing, at least now, a potentially lucrative market.
Dulaney: Frankly I will tell you if I was making a phone today I would not give a damn about business because the consumer market is far bigger. If they want to get into enterprise, they have to create a different model with different characteristics. One of the reasons MACs are not accepted is because [companies] always insist on disaster recovery. If HP goes belly up, they want to be able to go to Dell, etc. They want their phones arrangements to be structured in the same way. There is not that option here. It's a perennial Achilles' heel for Apple. Corporations like its products, but won't deploy them if they don't feel safe.

Weinschenk: So what are you telling your clients?
Dulaney: What we do is start off with a framework. There are three support levels. One is the platform level. That means when you buy the device and put apps on it, you can do pretty much what you want to do, like on a PC or notebook. Apple is not in that class yet. The second level is the appliance level. That is narrowed down to email, browsing, telephony, PIM. You need an email gateway to RIM, Good Technology, etc. They have not announced that, but they could probably get into that in the next six months or year. The third level the concierge level. If, say, a company is forced to support something by the CEO, then they can provide the concierge level. It's like a hotel: You hire people to do the work. It's expensive but they do it for you. Today we say that the iPhone is at the concierge level.

Weinschenk: What does this mean at the practical level?
Dulaney: When someone calls IT to get help on iPhone, they should not take that call because it is not something they can take on today. If IT responds it's implied that they are making sure it's secure, manageable, etc. You can't promise that with the iPhone today.

Weinschenk: What about the future?
Dulaney: What we said in the note is that IT should get the device and start to use it. [If it gains appliance level status] at some point in time, IT will have to figure out what to do.

Weinschenk: For it to change levels, would Apple have to take any steps?
Dulaney: Apple would have to cooperate to make available tools these companies need to put on their gateways and test. I don't see any scenario where they reach the platform level. [They could aim at the appliance level, so] we are telling companies to keep abreast. That means answer questions on how to link to e-mail, etc.

Weinschenk: What about the iTunes requirement. It seems unlikely businesses would go for that. Do you think Apple would drop it?
Dulaney: They might depend on how badly they want to get into the business. They don't tell anyone anything. What they basically want us to do is try to interpolate facts, and come back to them and enable them to say you're wrong. It makes it difficult when everything is kept so secret. The inclination of humans to speculate, and they can say no, that's wrong.