"No major business wakes up one day and says, 'We want a bunch of tablets,'" Gee says. "Instead, they're asking, 'How do I extend an existing legacy infrastructure to a mobile workforce and mobile customers?' You have to look at webOS in the context of modernizing an existing [IT] infrastructure."

That modernization trend includes storage and network threat analysis and management. Last year, HP invested heavily in both these areas by , a storage utility vendor, and ArcSight, which offers security event monitoring, analysis and correlation to detect threats or compliance violations. "It's logical to assume that technologies from 3PAR and ArcSight will be closely integrated into webOS, and customized for the specific requirements of HP's clients," says Mykola Golovko, an analyst with Euromonitor International, a U.K.-based global market research company.

One person willing to test Gee's claim that the TouchPad is enterprise-ready is James Gordon, vice president of Needham Bank in Needham, Mass. He's on a list to get one of the new tablets for evaluation. "We're supporting the 'consumerization' of IT," he says. "I want to make sure that our mobile projects are as technologically agnostic as possible. And I want to gauge the security of these [new] platforms. I have real reservations about [Google] Android every time I read about it."

The community bank has about $1.1 billion in assets, five branches, and about 95 employees. Half of them, , and most recently the board of directors, are equipped with mobile devices running Apple's iOS: about 30 iPhones and 20 iPads.

Gordon says he likes the fact that the TouchPad's firmware is webOS 3.0 and not 1.0. It's the latest version of the OS first released on Palm smartphones two years ago. He's also intrigued by HP's plans to bring webOS to a wide range of new and existing products, a plan he calls "reasonably brilliant."