Apple announced that it is seriously beefing up the iPhone's enterprise-level muscle and plans to add several features for business users including Push email and Microsoft Exchange support. The news came during a special media event on Thursday.

Senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing Phil Schiller said that the iPhone will be able to use Microsoft's ActiveSync to communicate with Exchange servers, which is good news for users that want to integrate their combination iPod and smart phone with corporate data systems.

Apple is also adding support for Push contacts, global address lists, Cisco IPsec VPN, certificates and identities, WPA2/802.1x, the ability to remote erase lost or stolen iPhones, and more.

While great news for iPhone users, the new features are likely to send a shudder through Research in Motion. So far, RIM's big advantage over the iPhone in corporate environments has been that it offers the features and management controls that IT departments require for handheld device support.

Since Apple plans on adding all of these features to every iPhone with a software update, that means anyone that already has one of Apple's handheld devices can add it to their corporate network -- with their IT department's blessing -- and abandon their Blackberry.

Apple did not say when it will release its iPhone Enterprise software update.

With apologies to Monty Python, it may time for RIM to go and change its armor.

[Thanks to ars technica for information about the iPhone Enterprise features.]