I'm sure Steve Jobs is vastly relieved.

Actually, I don't think he probably cares; Gartner is in some sense delivering a blessing on a relationship already consumated in sin. The iPhone is going to succeed or fail as a business device and a mobile phone based on the weight of compulsion its users can exercise, rather than its merits as a device suited for integration in the corporate IT environment.

According to Silicon.com, Gartner's iPhone 2.0 Is Ready for the Enterprise, but Caveats Apply report indicates that the latest firmware release has brought the device up to "minimum requirements" but that security was still less than desirable in a smart mobile device. And while the minimum requirements basically mean "Exchange compatible" the real issue for most IT departments isn't simply the security or the compatibility, but the very different stance that Apple brings to enterprise grade support: in a word, none.

Of course, none of these factors applies in the more modern "2.0" paradigm, and that may be where we're seeing such a disconnect between what traditional CIOs are saying and what Gartner is encouraging. In a world where you have black-boxed or outsourced many of your services and applications, where staff are independent, technically adept, and highly mobile, an iPhone standard for the organization makes a tremendous amount of sense. In older, more entrenched IT environments, where great reliance is still placed on centralization, customized applications, and traditional forms of security (VPNs and device-level encryption for thick applications and off-site data), the Blackberry or Windows Mobile devices, unsexy as they are, continue to provide so dramatically better a fit that the comparison almost isn't there... new firmware or no.