CTIA going back to enterprise roots with fall show

Usually a new technology or application has to find its legs in the enterprise world before it’s ready to hit the mass market, but in the wireless industry the opposite has been true over the last half decade. Mobile data services and applications have proved themselves in the consumer market and now they’re making their way to the corporation.

“We’ve seen a lot of innovation happen in the consumer space over the last few years,” said Rob Mesirow, vice president of operations for CTIA, the Wireless Association. “It’s really backwards. Usually you have to go vertical before you go horizontal.”

But the industry has come full circle. Three years after the consumer application revolution sparked by the Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone, the enterprise side of the wireless industry is entering into one of its most innovative cycles, not only repurposing for the enterprise many of the technologies and services developed for consumer platforms but also striking out into new vertical markets from health care to energy management and plumbing new depths in mobile commerce.

That evolution is reflected in CTIA’s annual fall show, which begins Wednesday with the new name CTIA Enterprise & Applications, Mesirow said. The new moniker may seem like a new take on its former name of 10 years, CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment, but Mesirow said that CTIA is returning to its enterprise roots with the rebranding. The enterprise never went away at CTIA’s fall shows, Mesirow explained—keynotes, sessions and exhibits have always been tailored for the enterprise side of the mobile industry. But the entertainment aspects of the mobile industry often overshadowed the enterprise in recent years due to the enormous spotlight shown on consumer applications and service innovation. “We never really lost sight of our original enterprise focus,” Mesirow said.

This year that spotlight returns to the enterprise and vertical markets Mesirow said. The show will kick off with keynotes from (NYSE:SY) Sybase chairman and CEO John Chen on mobile commerce and US Department of Energy under secretary Kristina Johnson on smart energy. Day 2 will host a panel of enterprise CIOs from UPS (NYSE:UPS), Western Union (NYSE:WU) and HealthSouth (NYSE:HLS) to discuss the roll of wireless applications and services in some of the country’s biggest companies. On Day 3, Ford Motor (NYSE:F) group vice president of global product development will give attendees a glimpse into the connected car. CTIA’s traditional operator membership will be represented by Verizon Communications (NYSE:VZ) president and chief operating officer Lowell McAdam and AT&T (NYSE:T) Business Solutions president and CEO John Stankey.

Gone are the big Facebook and Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) presentations that have characterized CTIA fall shows in the past. Mesirow said there will be plenty of representation for the consumer and entertainments side of the industry among the panels and the break-out shows at CTIA—for instance, Billboard Live with be hosting its Entertainment Live! event at CTIA, focusing on mobile music—but the big guns are reserved for business.

The focus may be shifting from new media companies that live on the NASDAQ to the established firms that inhabit the New York Stock Exchange, but it doesn’t mean the device focus will settle on the business-oriented BlackBerry instead of the iPhone. Many of the same platforms that have captured the imagination of consumers are having an equal impact on enterprise services. The iPad sparked a big wave of business intelligence application development. While Research in Motion’s (NASDAQ:RIMM) BlackBerry is still the standard among executives, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) may spark a cross-platform resurgence with its new highly acclaimed Windows Phone 7 OS, just as the iPhone and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) Android platforms become more business friendly.

A lot of the hidey-holes and backrooms at CTIA will be devoted to development on those platforms. A seven-hour session focusing on building enterprise apps for the iPad and other Tablet platforms will take place on Wednesday along with other ‘bootcamps’ for the Android and Nokia’s Symbian platforms. Mesirow said developers will make up the single largest segment of attendees at the event, representing 23% of all registrants.