With AT&T’s announcement this week that it would begin offering iPhone data plans, many CIOs and IT executives may be curious to see how the popular consumer devices can boost productivity within the workplace. But before making any investments, CIOs should have a clear understanding of just what the iPhone can and can’t provide for enterprise users.

Let’s start with the obvious: the iPhone is not a substitute for a BlackBerry and isn’t meant to be. AT&T says that its enterprise iPhone plan isn’t designed to provide competition for Research in Motion’s BlackBerry, but is rather intended to give enterprises another option for mobile voice and data services. Additionally, AT&T says it isn’t adding any specific features to iPhones offered through its enterprise plan that would make them significantly different from their consumer-plan counterparts. Thus, any iPhones purchased by enterprises will not support corporate e-mail, nor will they have the extensive firewall security infrastructure of BlackBerries.

“We’re just serving the needs of those who have iPhones and want to be able to use them in their businesses,” says a company spokesman. “We aren't offering a corporate e-mail package, so there’s no comparison to the other services at this point.”

That’s not to say, however, that the iPhone won’t offer anything unique to enterprise customers. Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle, says that the iPhone has a “Swiss Army knife” quality to it that can reduce the total number of devices used by employees and thus increase productivity in the workplace. And Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney notes that the iPhone has set the standard for mobile Internet browsing, which he says is the No. 1 reason it has become so popular with consumers.

“The browsing experience is much better than with the BlackBerry, and it’s damn easy to use,” he says. “It’s on a totally different plane for ease of use, but there’s not a lot of depth to it. That’s its biggest problem.”

iPhone security

So what would Dulaney like to see added before he could recommend it as an enterprise device? The big piece that's missing is security infrastructure, he says. Although the iPhone provides VPN access, he says that Apple and AT&T’s security protocols simply “aren’t up to snuff” for today’s enterprises. If Apple and AT&T want their popular device to be widely adopted by businesses, he says, they’ll either have to develop their own native security protocols or open up the iPhone platform to let outside security developers do the work for them.