iPhones in the enterprise leaving IT at wit's end

Executives smitten with iPhones are forcing enterprise IT departments to come up with ways to support the mobile devices even though big security and management questions abound.

[ Slideshow: Products from Interop ]

IT pros peppered panelists at a standing-room only Interop session titled "The iPhone and the Enterprise: Is this the Future of IT?" with such questions and left without many answers.

One healthcare IT pro said supporting iPhones would be a nightmare given industry data protection regulations and the ability of end users to relatively easily "jailbreak" their iPhones. Another IT pro pointed out that supporting a bunch of native apps on iPhones would seem to run counter to other IT trends, such as the move toward desktop virtualization and centralized applications control.

Panelist J.T. Starzecki, president of application development and consulting company iPhone Zen Masters, acknowledged that IT pros are left with the "dilemma of how to fit iPhones into their current infrastructure" in light of executives adopting iPhones for personal use and then calling on IT to support them in the business.

"IPhone 2.0 made some leaps toward enterprise adoption [with support for Exchange ActiveSync, etc, but it's not where it should be," he said.

One big challenge in supporting iPhones is that it's hard to find an organization that wouldn't also have a handful of other mobile device types to support, said Adam Blum, CEO of Rhomobile, which makes a framework for building native mobile device apps that can work across platforms. Supporting multiple platforms would only add to an IT department's workload, he said. "We'll always have heterogeneity," he said.

While IT shops might not be happy about losing control over end devices stuffed with applications, Blum said there's not much they can do about the shift. He noted that some applications, such as GPS and cameras, must be on the end device. He pointed to the emergence of applications on iPhones and other smartphones in the enterprise as part of the seemingly never-ending back and forth nature of centralized and decentralized computing.

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