BEYOND THE APPS

The wireless service provider sector has long been criticized for being so focused on the consumer market that it is unable to develop the enterprise realm as a lucrative business. Typically, that criticism centers around the lack of applications available to address the mobile needs of enterprise operations, as well as mobile carriers' inability to adequately market to enterprise customers. (Iain Gillott, a mobile analyst and founder of iGillottResearch, recently launched a new print and online information service concerning new mobile applications that's targeted at mobile carriers' sales forces, in an attempt to keep the operators' feet on the street much better informed about what's being developed on the apps side and connect the people who talk directly to customers back to apps developers.) But as Kevin Fitchard's article, Network Fit for an Enterprise, points out, applications and marketing are not the only limits to developing the mobile enterprise market — there also are important network infrastructure issues to be tackled before carriers can address the enterprise customer sector with mobile service offerings. So-called next-gen wireless networks might have more capacity and be far more capable of transporting and delivering data apps than they used to be, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're correctly optimized to do so at an enterprise level. Mobile service providers need to shift their mindsets and address a number of complex technology issues — not just applications and marketing questions — if they want to find real enterprise success.