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Philip Elmer DeWitt, Fortune’s Apple columnist, took a look today at why the iPhone is still not cutting any ice in the enterprise and is still firmly viewed as a consumer device.

A conference call with four major CIOs was organized by Morgan Stanley and of the four, only one provided IT support for iPhones and then only for their “creative” employees….and they are not planning on doing so in the future.

Asked to sum up why, the CIO of a major Silicon Valley semiconductor services compnay said this…

“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.”

Considering the fact that Apple now seems focused on positioning the iPhone as a gaming and lifestyle device, having given up even paying lipservice to business customers, I can’t see the position of corporate IT changing any time soon. The iPhone, and Macs in general, are just too closed a system for them to work with.

Unless Apple decides that a serious presence in the boardroom is worth as much as long lines outside the San Francisco Apple store and happy college kids, the doors of Enterprise will remain closed to the iPhone.

Read the entire column HERE.

(Photo credit: Fortune)