Sabre, which has about 10,000 employees globally, is wrestling with how to embrace new technologies that become popular with consumers, Genevezos said. The travel-industry company has given BlackBerry devices to some top executives. But for the most part, Sabre's workers still rely on desktop PCs.

Dealing with the security issues raised by consumer-oriented devices "is a game of catch-up for everybody in IT because there are so many new devices and so many vendors," Genevezos said. In general, he added, underlying security technology is "not there" for the new products. And, he noted, the process for installing security updates in Windows Mobile is different from the process for updating Windows Vista, adding even more complexity.

An IT manager at a major university in the Boston area said products such as the iPhone will make it necessary for IT professionals like himself and others to figure out ways to support an even wider range of devices than they imagined even a year ago.

The IT manager, who asked not to be identified, said that about 30% of the users at the university have Macintosh computers and probably will want to try out the iPhone on campus once it becomes available.

Gartner analyst Nick Jones said 2007 has already emerged as a year when IT managers will face more and more options for mobile computing -- and they will have to choose not only among a variety of hardware devices but also among operating systems, such as Windows Mobile and the Symbian OS favored by Nokia Corp. "Confusion is definitely rising," Jones said.