CurrentCast - CTIA Enterprise and Applications 2011: The Year Enterprise Deserved the Name

Kathry Weldon Principal Analyst, Enterprise Mobility

Peter Jarich Service Director, SPI and Mobile Ecosystem

Date: Oct 20, 2011
Market: Applications and Services
Report Type: Advisory Report
Analysts: Peter Jarich, Kathryn Weldon

The 2011 edition of CTIA Enterprise and Applications – affectionately known as “the fall CTIA show” – took place from October 11th through October 13th in San Diego, CA. Where CTIA predicted 15,000 attendees, the packed keynotes led by Dan Hesse (Sprint), Ralph de la Vega (AT&T Mobility) and Dan Meade (Verizon Wireless) seemed to back up their hopes, even if the quiet show floor and griping exhibitors didn’t.

In years past, the show had suffered from a confused image. Was it about entertainment, applications, or IT and the enterprise? While “yes” to all of the above might be accurate, it was not very compelling for anyone who was looking for trends coming out of it. This year, however, things were different. This year, the enterprise made its presence felt, as outlined in our earlier report CTIA Enterprise and Applications 2011: BYOD, App Stores, and M2M Take Center Stage. In short, the enterprise focus was felt most keenly around a handful of topics.

Consumerization of IT

• Key Announcements: AT&T’s Toggle service for dual-persona device functionality; Verizon Wireless’ work with VMware to deliver dual-persona device functionality; and Verizon Wireless’ Private Application Store for Business.

• Key Takeaways: The consumerization of IT has been discussed to death, but in the mobile space, it has most often led to follow-on discussions around mobile device management (MDM). Dual-persona device clients and enterprise app stores paint a broader picture and expect to hear more on these fronts going forward – including from the enablers of these services like enterprise app store enabler Partnerpedia. They also raise some key questions. How will users be incented to use enterprise app stores, bypassing native stores and what’s the iPhone solution? In the same vein, how will users take to the notion of dual-persona devices? How can an operator make them more palatable? Lastly, if there is a market for dual-persona devices, why isn’t it owned by device makers who can better integrate it into their experience?

Fixed-mobile Convergence

• Key Announcements: AT&T’s Office Direct and Dual-Mode Mobile Voice; T-Mobile USA’s Global Corporate Access; Verizon Wireless’ Mobile Unified Communication Client and Docking Station.

• Key Takeaways. WiFi continues to gain ground as a solution for delivering global data roaming services, driven by aggregators and exchanges, which can pull together a footprint of locations sizeable enough to be meaningful to operators with diverse consumer and enterprise customers. If the WiFi story is a relatively new one, the concept of extending enterprise and fixed calling features to the mobile is anything but. Where individual enterprises might have moved on these solutions in the past, the involvement of carriers lends an endorsement and a channel partner for the vendors powering the solutions – but the efficiency and cost control value proposition will need to be crystal clear, and ideally illustrated with real world examples.

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Communications

• Key Announcements: GSMA report on M2M market potential; nPhase securing Trimble Agriculture as a part of its developer program; RACO’s collaboration with Everything Everywhere; Sprint’s traction update announcement.

• Key Takeaways. Like the extension of fixed phone capabilities to the mobile environment, the concept of M2M communications has been bandied about for years. And, M2M has suffered a similar history of slow growth despite early analyst predictions and vendors proclaiming the value of connecting anything that would benefit (in the least) from connectivity. With the enabling technologies in place, the near-term imperative for the market is highlighting the value – getting the word out. Carrier-manufacturer or carrier-carrier partnerships do just that. So too does messaging aimed at simply pointing to use cases and market opportunities. The problem, however, lies in the definition of the market. When M2M is broadly taken to mean anything from sensors to laptops to tablets (which the GSMA report did), generalizing the use cases is nearly impossible and does little to help with painting a way forward for any single market segment or identifying how big the market really is.

The following podcast, then, discusses these trends, the tone of the show and what it tells us about mobility for the rest of the year, and beyond.

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