Ever wondered why your company will support Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry but not the iPhone? Does it seem like the corporate deck is stacked against Apple (AAPL)?

A conference call with four chief information officers organized by Morgan Stanley's Kathryn Huberty last week might have confirmed your worst fears.

Of the four guests, only one — the CIO of a multi-billion dollar company who runs a Mac shop for the "creatives" who work there — actively supports the iPhone.

The other three dismissed the device with varying degrees of curiosity and contempt.

• "[Our company] doesn't explicitly prevent employees from using the iPhone," said one veteren CIO. "But we don’t support it through the help desk. So if there’s a problem we won’t help them with the issue."

• "Frankly," added a second, "some management in our organization think it’s more of a toy/gimmick thing because of the way it's marketed."

• The third summed up the posture of his department as "Use [it] at your own cost and peril."

What, exactly did these IT professionals see as the iPhone's shortcomings?

The most detailed answer came from Timothy Campos, the former CIO of KLA-Tencor (KLAC), a leading supplier of semiconductor yield enhancement equipment based in Milpitas, Calif.:

"Apple is way behind BlackBerry in terms of centralized management of these devices," he said. "They’re starting to catch up, but in terms of being able to control and manage what is on the device, to configure the device, to do remote provisioning of the device, to make sure the device works — we can do that for the BlackBerry; we can’t do that for the iPhone.

"It’s a solvable problem, but there’s no business case — at least in our industry — for solving that problem. And so do we don’t do it.

"What's interesting about the iPhone is [that] the capability of the device is tremendous," he added. "We're looking closely at it. There are a lot of people in IT who play around with it. So I wouldn’t say we have our heads in the sand. And as Apple catches up on the centralized management issues, it's not out of the realm of possibility that we would replace BlackBerrys with iPhones, or add iPhones to the mix."

That sentiment got dittos across the board. But in the current economic climate — which has put constraints on IT spending at all four companies — these managers are not looking to complicate their lives.

"We might have taken it on if it weren't for the downturn," said the managing director of IT at a ceramics manufacturing company that already supports two mobile platforms — BlackBerry and Palm. His department was thinking of adding the iPhone to the mix. But "that was one of the projects we didn’t need to take on," he said.

Apple can take comfort in the fact that IT's resistance to change is generalized and not restricted to the iPhone. Three of these four shops are still running Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows XP — with no plans to move up to either Vista or Windows 7.

Photo: Apple Inc.

The World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) that opens Monday morning in San Francisco would be a relatively obscure technical gathering of programmers and IT administrators – with sessions on "Advances in OpenGL" and "What's New in Objective-C" – were it not for one thing.

Steve Jobs.

The keynote address that Apple's CEO is scheduled to give starting at 10 am Pacific Time (1 pm ET) is perhaps the second most closely watched event in high tech – after the opening speech Jobs gives every January at Macworld.

In the audience at Moscone West's main hall will be – in addition to thousands of developers (WWDC sold out for the first time this year) – hundreds of reporters, photographers, TV crews, venture capitalists, CEOs and maybe even a few celebrities from Hollywood and the music world.

What's Jobs going to talk about? To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, there are known knowns and known unknowns. That is to say, there are things we think we know he's going to say, and things we know we don't know. Here's a rundown:

3G iPhone. Except for a few short sellers on Wall Street, everybody who follows Apple assumes that Jobs will introduce a new iPhone that can send and receive data at so-called third-generation speeds. (In fact, so widespread is this belief that if Jobs doesn't show up with the thing on Monday, Apple's (AAPL) shares will get hammered before he leaves the stage.) Almost everything else about iPhone 2.0 are matters of little hard information and intense speculation. Is it thicker or thinner than version 1.0? Will it have a built-in GPS chip so it always knows where it's at? Will its price be subsidized by AT&T and the overseas carriers? Will it go on sale next week or sometime later? If these questions weren't still in play, there would be almost nothing to talk about next week.

The SDK. We know Jobs is going to spend some time discussing the so-called software development kit for the iPhone. We know because that's one of the two main themes of the conference (symbolized by the bizarre image of two Golden Gate Bridges that decorated the e-mail invitation). The other theme is the Macintosh operating system; presumably the two are merging somewhere in Marin County, judging by the doctored photograph. The SDK will finally give third party developers access to the platform Apple has managed to build, as Jupiter Research's Michael Gartenberg notes, without them. There's a flood of new software for the iPhone and iPod touch ready for release soon as Apple gives the word – including programs that will allow IT departments, should they be so inclined, to integrate the iPhone into their enterprises the way Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry is today.

.Mac. Even Jobs agrees that Apple's $99-a-year suite of Internet services (Mail, Backup, iSync, iDisk, etc.) needs an overhaul, if only to match the online applications that Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) now offer for free. By tracking crumbs of information scattered in recent Apple software releases, some observers believe Jobs is set to replace .Mac with something called Mobile Me, or just plain .Me. Probably the single most effective thing Apple could do improve .Mac would be to emulate Google and give it away.

Another iPhone. Speculation that Jobs would introduce a so-called iPhone nano – a smaller iPhone at a more affordable price – has faded; the smart money has pushed this back to next January. However, as American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu points out, there are good reasons to suspect that Apple will keep the first generation iPhone around, if only to have something to sell in those parts of Latin America – and parts of North America, for that matter – where where 3G coverage is spotty or nonexistent.

New MacBooks. Two weeks ago, Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster put the odds of Apple introducing redesigned Mac portables next week at 60%. The other odds he gave – 80% by the end of summer – now seem more like it.

New Touchscreen device. Wu in report to clients this week said he's learned that work on larger, 4-inch and 7-inch multitouch devices has "gone beyond the prototype stage" at Apple. He goes out on a limb and gives 50-50 odds that one will be introduced at WWDC next week.

Those are the key themes, but there's plenty more to speculate about. If you want to dig deeper – in a suitably interactive way – come to WWDC with a copy of the 2008 edition of John Siracusa's Keynote Bingo card, pasted below the fold. The rules are laid out in detail at Ars Technica here, but they're pretty straightforward: put a token over a square if Jobs mentions the topic or says the word or introduces the speaker during the keynote. Cover five squares in an a row, and you get to stand up and shout Bingo!

Nobody's won the game yet. This could be the year.

[Moscone West photo courtesy of MacNN.]

In the weeks before the iPhone was released last June, there were few analysts more reviled by Apple (AAPL) enthusiasts than Gartner's Ken Delanay.

On June 19, ten days before the device went on sale, he gave it the information technology kiss of death. “We’re telling IT executives to not support it because Apple has no intentions of supporting (iPhone use in) the enterprise,” he told Network World's Jon Brodkin. “This is basically a cellular iPod with some other capabilities and it’s important that it be recognized as such.” (link)

Then, on the eve of iDay, as eager buyers by the thousands camped out overnight waiting for the doors of Apple stores to open, he followed up with a research note. "General requests to support iPhone should not be fulfilled," he recommended, and then ticked off seven reasons the iPhone was not fit for corporate enterprises. (link)

So it is with some irony that Ken Delaney is listed as the principal author of the five page report titled "Gartner Changes its iPhone Enterprise Recommendations." It begins:

The iPhone will soon be tailored for enterprises. Gartner recommends "appliance-level" support status once firmware 2.0 and improvements are released. iPhone will become a popular tool alongside BlackBerry and Microsoft devices.

The full report is available here for $95, but there's a summary at Computerworld.com here. It notes that although Gartner has upgraded the iPhone from the lowest level (concierge) of its three-tiered rating system to the middle (appliance), it has withheld the top rating (platform) because Apple is the only supplier that makes the device — as if licensing firmware to iPhone cloners would make it more secure.

Of course, the reason Gartner changed its tune is that Apple's enterprise roadmap and SDK took pains to address each item in the IT wishlist. (See here.) It should be noted, however, that several of Delaney's original seven objections remain unanswered, including "no removable battery" and "only one carrier operator (AT&T)." Full list here.

We're still waiting for a change of signals from Forrester Research, whose 10 reasons not to support the iPhone created such a stir in December.

Wondering why your corporate Information Technology department won't buy you an Apple (AAPL) iPhone or support the one you bought yourself? Here's your answer.

Or, rather, 10 answers. Channeling the thought processes of IT managers who don't need many excuses not to support yet another platform, Forrester Research(FORR) has put together the definitive top 10 reasons not to support this one — fully documented, complete with footnotes. Why now, just when the device seems to be making back-door inroads into the workplace? That's why.

Forrester predicts that the iPhone will find its way into many enterprise environments — if it hasn’t already — because C-level executives are buying them and expecting support from IT. It’s only a matter of time before the iPhone filters down the corporate pyramid, and IT should have a strategy to handle these requests. … You’ll get complaints from your most enthusiastic Apple fans — and let’s be honest, what Apple fans aren’t enthusiastic? Be ready with a business case as to why your mobile operations team made this strategic business decision.

What follows is a window into the world of the IT manager. Alternatively, you can think of it as a checklist of the issues Apple must address if it wants the iPhone to be accepted as an enterprise-worthy device.

Without further ado, excerpts from the top 10 reasons Forrester recommends that IT not support the iPhone:

1. Doesn’t natively support push business email or over-the-air calendar sync. … The iPhone can sync with Microsoft’s Exchange and IBM’s Lotus Notes over IMAP and SMTP ports, but your server and security admins have to configure their infrastructure to do so or purchase a mobile gateway from Synchronica or Azaleos….

2. Doesn’t accommodate third-party applications, including those internally developed. … This is a showstopper for companies with enterprise mobility initiatives that require line-of-business applications like mobile sales force automation or an industry-specific application like mobile claims…

3. Doesn’t support securing data on the device through encryption. There is no way for a company to natively secure the data on an iPhone with file or disk encryption…
4. Can’t be remotely locked or wiped in the event of a lost or stolen device. …there is no way for IT to lock a device if — scratch that, when — users call the help desk and explain that they left their non-password-protected iPhone behind in a taxi…

5. Lacks a hard keypad that provides feedback, which isn’t ideal for rapid and accurate input. … Many respected journalists have come to the conclusion that ultimately the keyboard “is a nonissue,”

   but only after five days of use. In speaking with enterprise-class mobile device users on a daily basis, the vast majority have found that they need some form of tactile feedback from their QWERTY or numeric keyboards. …

6. Has limited service provider support and its carrier lock-in inhibits flexibility. …To date, Apple has officially announced four exclusive carriers for France (Orange), Germany (T- Mobile), the UK (O2), and the United States (AT&T). Outside of these countries, the iPhone isn’t available yet…

7. Comes with a premium price tag. …Sourcing analysts rely on corporatewide discounts when they place a bulk order with their carrier, but AT&T will not sell the iPhone to business accounts — only consumers. Because the iPhone is purchased directly by the user, there’s no taking advantage of the discount. Moreover, IT is stuck in an endless loop of reactively supporting the device, which limits the ability to provide best-in-class service….

8. Is only the first generation. …even Apple enthusiasts admit that there are some weaknesses they’d like to see fixed in future generations, like making it easier to activate the device, improving the battery life and sound quality, and, most importantly, allowing it to connect to higher-speed networks (3G) …
9. Lacks a removable battery, so when the battery kicks it, so does the device. … Apple does not sell replacement batteries for the iPhone. So when the battery dies, so does worker productivity….

10. Lacks case studies of firms that have deployed it enterprisewide. … There is one known large enterprise that supports iPhones companywide, and it is Apple itself. Beyond that, we haven’t heard of many enterprises that have embraced the iPhone as a corporate device. And, as tough as it is to admit, the most trusted advisors to IT operations professionals aren’t industry analysts, journalists, or even the vendors themselves; it’s your peers…

UPDATE on No. 1: AppleInsider reports today on a new company job listing at Apple for "a motivated, highly-technical Exchange test/sync engineer" to join a team focused on "testing Exchange and Outlook functionality with Apple’s innovative new phone." The full listing is available here.