By Dan Turchin, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aeroprise. Follow Dan on Twitter.

That Newton guy might have been wrong. Apple continues to defy gravity. How else do you explain 7.4 million iPhones sold in three months and the company's second best quarterly profit ever in a market reeling because consumers aren't spending? So much momentum, so many records shattered, so much well-earned praise... and yet, in the enterprise Apple's iPhone is the Robin to BlackBerry's Batman. Sure, a few green-capes roll in each Halloween but let's just say the mayor of Gotham City won't be changing his speed dial any time soon.

Every day we're asked what it will take for iPhone to become a (the?) enterprise standard. Here's my view...

BlackBerry has more than 34,000 enterprise customers because its management middleware, the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), is far superior to anything on the market (today). BES makes it easy to manage devices, distribute software, and enforce security policies. But Apple's catching up fast and will close the gap if it makes enterprise deployments a priority. Let's look at each key BES advantage vs. the iPhone enterprise solution.

Device management: each BlackBerry has a PIN that identifies it to the BES. BES admins can manage any device or all devices simultaneously - for instance, upgrade the OS or wipe memory - with a direct push from the BES console. Apple offers similar features integrated directly to Exchange via the Active Directory mobile user profile. Non-Exchange users must instead use the iPhone configuration utility. With certain features, when there are updates end-users are required to manually install new config files on their devices. This is fine for environments where personal iPhones are supported but aren't the corporate standard. It doesn't scale to thousands of centrally-managed users.

Software distribution: BES pushes new applications directly to BlackBerrys. The iPhone Exchange integration requires end-users to download new apps through the App Store. With BES, admins can control which apps do and don't appear on a per-user basis. The App Store is amazing on many levels - technological, cultural, and otherwise - but for all of its strengths it lacks server-based whitelisting features because it operates locally on each device. IT has no way to discover which apps have been downloaded to each iPhone.

Security policy: one of the most basic features of the BES is policy-based device control. BES admins can centrally set policies like whether or not devices can access third-party applications or which ones can use the internal browser. As with device management, most of the same features are supported by the iPhone but they can require multiple products (a pre-installed Cisco VPN client plus a role-based third-party utility plus...) and user pull (vs. server push).

Yeah, this is a bird's eye view and could be more thorough but it's unbiased and hopefully fills a gap that exists between foot-high product docs and religious wars in the blogosphere. What does it confirm? BlackBerry's wearing the black tights today but 7.4 million iPhones and a Jobsian underdog complex in Cupertino say that may not be the case for long.

The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.