But Gee readily admits that these "essential" features are "table stakes" -- the basic necessities to meet a minimum level of security and manageability.

"Since we have one of the world's largest [IT] service organizations and software for IT management and security, for application development quality assurance and security, and experience in how we run data centers, the real opportunity is in asking, 'What lessons can we learn from all this and then build into webOS?'" Gee says. [See .]

He would only talk in generalities, such as the need for centralized management in deploying and supporting thousands of webOS devices, or the value in leveraging software quality assurance capabilities for webOS development. He declined to be specific about upcoming products or their availability, but insisted HP is committed to this course.

"We are dead set on turning those into reality, really fast," he says.

Only Microsoft is in a similar position to integrate a mobile platform, in this case , with an extensive, existing corporate IT infrastructure. Neither Apple nor Google, by contrast, have presence in the back end of the corporate network, though some of that is changing as back end services migrate to a mix of public and private clouds. And both rely heavily on Exchange ActiveSync and third-party device management software for security and management features.