The Burton Group will be hosting a telebriefing Aug 28th and 29th to formally discuss the question, "is the iPhone ready for the Enterprise," according to one of the Burton Group member's Blog on Tuesday.

There have been many discussions, mostly informal about the potential of the iPhone in the Enterprise. In fact, the overall question is a good one because it "helps us focus on what kinds of devices are, in fact, for enterprise use and which ones are not," according to Richard Monson-Haefel.

Mr. Monson-Haefel plans to let the telebriefing discuss the details, but he had some ideas of his own: "Today the number of enterprise applications you can use with iPhone is small but it’s growing. For example, Funambol offers an iPhone interface to Outlook that promises to be pretty good – I haven’t used it yet but hope to get invited to the private beta soon. Another example is LiveTime, which is an application that provides service support interface for field technicians."

One of the drawbacks the iPhone has is its lack of persistent storage. "As a result, every time you have to access an iPhone web application you load it from scratch. That can be a pain when working over the EDGE network with applications that are not properly designed for the iPhone," Mr. Monson-Haefel said.

Even with its current design, iPhone is getting serious attention from serious researchers tackling the question of what it will take to make the iPhone a serious business tool.