IT departments are finally starting to buy Apple's smartphone, says a Deutsche Bank report

Click to enlarge. Source: Deutsche Bank

"There is growing evidence that the iPhone is making inroads into the Enterprise," writes Deutsche Bank research analyst Chris Whitmore in a report to clients Monday.

According to his estimates, Apple (AAPL) by the end of the year will have shipped about 2 million iPhones into corporate accounts through various routes, including internal IT department purchases and formal reimbursement policies.

That would give Apple about a 7% share of the enterprise smartphone market this year, up from 2% in 2008.

IT departments were famously resistant to the iPhone when it was launched two years ago. That resistance has begun to melt, writes Whitmore, for several reasons:

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San Francisco is using advanced technology – and the strong arm of government – to turn the city into one of America's greenest.

By David Ewing Duncan

Gavin Newsom, mayor of San Francisco

On Pier 96 on San Francisco Bay, a dirty, smelly leviathan of a machine roars and vibrates as it organizes 750 tons of refuse each day into neat cubes of plastic, paper, and metal.

It may look crude, but this three-story-high knot of conveyors, computers, bins, and gears is a central part of San Francisco's growing effort to use technology and ingenuity as the most innovative companies do: to cut costs, solve problems, and improve life for customers (or in this case, citizens).

Communities that embrace technology in this way are increasingly branding themselves "smart cities" — a fancy marketing term describing a place that strives for efficiencies in mobility, construction, energy, and transportation, usually with the help of the latest digital or green technology.

Stockholm uses sensors, software, and computer networks to monitor traffic during peak periods. Shanghai boasts the world's first low-pollution magnetic railway that transports passengers at more than 100 mph. Massachusetts plans to install 300 wind turbines in its towns and cities. More

Verizon, Sybase and Quickcomm team up to manage corporations' mobility needs. Their service just scratches the surface

Chen wants to help your company go mobile. Photo: Sybase

Telecom giant Verizon (VZ) says it is launching a suite of services to help corporate IT departments manage their fleets of mobile devices. Corporate clients can hire Verizon to track their inventories of phones and monitor billings, add and drop devices as employees come and go, enforce security policies on phones and even remotely deliver applications and data to employees' handsets.

Verizon is partnering with software company Sybase (SY) and Quickcomm, which specializes in telecom-expense management, to offer a one-stop shop for companies looking to outsource mobile operations.

Analysts' reports suggest there's a need for such tools: Forrester Research estimates that by 2012 nearly three-fourths of workers worldwide, or nearly 400 million people, will be using mobile devices for work. More

Box.net CEO Aaron Levie. Photo: Box.net.

Cost-conscious businesses are looking online for IT

By Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder, Box.net

Something is clearly happening in the cloud. Two major juggernauts – the government and Microsoft – have both recently made cloud-related announcements. The government (hardly ever considered an early adopter) is planning to launch a cloud computing ‘Storefront’ to ease the federal deployment of these online services, with the ultimate goal of streamlining operations and saving money. Microsoft has finally detailed its plans to launch a web-based version of Office, albeit not until next year. More

The last version of Office didn't include a free online version. The next one will. Image: Microsoft

It’s too early to say Microsoft has checkmated Google in online documents – the latest version of Office hasn’t shipped yet. But the sleeping giant in Redmond has clearly woken up to the Internet threat.

Get this: Microsoft – the king of paid software – will announce today that it is going to give a version of Office away for free online. Both the online and desktop versions are scheduled to arrive in the first half of next year. Yes, you read that right. The latest version of its ubiquitous productivity software, dubbed Office 2010, will come as both a piece of software you can buy for your computer, and as a service you can access in your browser. [UPDATE: Microsoft says it will support the Firefox and Safari browsers as well as IE.] More

Cisco CEO John Chambers doesn't just talk a good game about telepresence, the videoconferencing technology that creates the illusion you're in a room with someone who's actually thousands of miles away. He's planning to install his company's high-end system in his Silicon Valley home, provided he and his wife can agree on a spot for it. "I figured we could convert one of the kids' old bedrooms," since they've grown up and left the house," he says. "She told me, 'You do that and you'll be sleeping in there.'"

Though he's not done negotiating the location, one thing that Chambers doesn't have to worry about is cost. ­As longtime chief at the networking giant, he can surely afford the installation, which can easily run north of $150,000 per room.

But can his customers? Even as Chambers and rivals such as Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Fortune 500), Polycom (PLCM) and Tandberg tout telepresence as the perfect tech tool to reduce travel costs and boost productivity, observers have their doubts. Sure, telepresence enables meetings on three or more huge screens, in high definition with pristine audio quality. (CSCO) (HPQ) (PLCM) (T)

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Cisco CIO Rebecca Jacoby

Even in these tough economic times, tech giant Cisco offers employees some pretty sweet benefits: Employees can visit on-campus doctors and dietitians, drop off dry cleaning, or get an oil change, and now they can pick the kind of computer they want to use at work.

That's right – Cisco has started letting workers choose from a handful of laptops, including an Apple MacBook Pro. Only don't call the program a perquisite. Rebecca Jacoby, Cisco's (CSCO, Fortune 500) top information technology officer, says the initiative, launched last year, should actually save the company money. The fact that employees involved in the pilot program are deliriously happy with it – Jacoby and her peers even get love notes from satisfied road warriors – is a bonus.

Of course, that new freedom requires companies and employees alike to make sacrifices. Since Cisco began offering a choice of machines last June, roughly a quarter of employees have opted for Macs, yet they are pretty much on their own for tech support. (An in-house online community for Mac users gets a little help from Jacoby's department.) Cisco, in turn, has to make a slightly higher upfront investment for the workers who want Macs, which are pricier than PCs.

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Cisco CEO John Chambers and Intel CEO Paul Otellini (center) are flanked by other Cisco executives as they explain how the two companies will work together on servers. Photo: Cisco

Cisco's new servers use more memory and faster I/O connections than mainstream competitors, and they come loaded with management software. Photo: Cisco

John Chambers is known for delivering Cisco's sales pitch like a revival preacher, complete with a country twang – and he summoned plenty of true believers Monday as he outlined Cisco's plans to bust into the $55 billion server market.

In the Cisco CEO's amen corner were no lesser lights than Intel (INTC) CEO Paul Otellini, VMware (VMW) CEO Paul Maritz, and EMC (EMC) CEO Joe Tucci – the top guys in chips, virtualization and storage. During a 90-minute online news conference that doubled as a showcase for Cisco's (CSCO) high-end teleconference system, that CEO chorus testified that Cisco's new "unified computing" gear is the real deal: By building more memory, faster data speeds and new management features into its boxes, Cisco might shake up the status quo in corporate data centers the way the iPod and iTunes did in digital music. More

Jon Fortt talks to Kenworth about a practical use for cloud computing.