As far as the enterprise is concerned, Apple's iPhone and Android-based devices are for the most part on the outside looking in. They will have plenty of opportunities in the near future, however, since the relationship between enterprises and mobility is on the verge of significant change.

Despite the many headlines of 2008 and the public's infatuation with Apple's devices, BlackBerry still is firmly in charge of the enterprise. It is well ensconced due to its stellar reputation and the formidable BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), which delivers e-mail and other goodies to end-user devices using a variety of operating systems. Windows Mobile is second banana, with Symbian a strong player outside the United States, according to Forrester analyst Michele Pelino.

The year ahead likely will see more emphasis put on enterprise development for the iPhone and Android. iPhone 2.0 and iPhone 3G link to the Microsoft Exchange Server, which is seen as a major step toward satisfying business users. Still to be worked through is the distribution of iPhone applications. The current model of selling apps through the App Store — alongside Ludacris tunes and Super Monkey Ball — will never gain favor with CIOs. Though it is at an even earlier stage, the introduction of several Android-based devices this year makes it a virtual certainty that the lucrative enterprise market will be targeted.

Enterprises move slowly, however. Pelino says that they now are starting to ask questions about iPhone deployment. Part of the reason is that that is what the people want. "We see the enterprise taking off with the mobile 'wannabe' segment," she says. "As we look to the future, we see consumers increasingly bringing devices into the work environment. They may not be traditional mobile workers, but they still are exerting pressure from the level below. They would like to get e-mail on the devices, check calendars, file expense reports and things like that."

She says that the "wannabe" segment — which is driven by younger tech-savvy people entering the workforce — is more pronounced in verticals such as health care, manufacturing and transportation. She adds that it may represent 6 percent of the work force in the next 18 months and grow into to the mid-20 percent level in five years.

Mobility, the Cloud and Great Change

Right now, writing apps for consumers "is almost the same" as doing so for enterprises, says Michael Schneider, a developer and technology transaction attorney at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati P.C., a Seattle law firm. He says the major difference is that apps aimed at the enterprise include easy ways to tap into corporate databases. "Most consumer applications don't require server interaction," he says.

The status quo is changing, however, as mobilization more fully meets the cloud. The trend is toward less self-contained applications that call on processing power and stored data not located within the device.

The biggest factor is that the concept of cloud computing, through the popularity of software-as-a-service and related initiatives, has moved from niche and academic to accepted and common. At the same time, 3G cellular networks have made it possible to reach mobile devices with enough data to make such networked approaches viable. The arrival of 4G — WiMax now and Long Term Evolution in the relatively near future — will push download speeds still higher and thus extend the concept. A third factor is that the revolution in user interfaces makes running complex applications on mobile devices possible for non-techies.

The change will be evident in both business and consumer apps, but will be especially significant in enterprise applications, which must reach deep into corporate databases, share data more ubiquitously, and collaborate on a more regular basis with other users.

The revolution in user interfaces started by the iPhone is a key. Developers, says Rob Woodbridge, the president and CEO of management software maker Rove, "have to put much more emphasis on the backend as on the client. The client is basically a presentation layer. Web 2.0 — with the browser as a way to display Web-based apps — is a perfect analogy to the mobile space. The browser is the display agent, the backend is for the processing."

This already is happening. Citrix's XenApp infrastructure delivers data to any device — mobile or desktop — regardless of the operating system, says Chris Fleck, the company's vice president of Solutions Development and Community Evangelism. Higher-level functions now carried out by the operating system running on the device can migrate to XenApp servers. The advantages of this approach are that it allows the standardization across many different operating systems and that it is highly secure. "Only pixels are delivered to the device," he says.

Another example of how mobile devices are reaching out is Soonr, which was introduced in early January 2009. Song Huang, the company's co-founder and chief evangelist, sees a world in which the mobile device is one of three elements vital to the execution of specific tasks. The other two, he says, are users' PCs — where users' unique data is entered and stored — and the cloud. Soonr, which is an app for the iPhone, automatically backs up PC data to the cloud, where it is indexed. Thumbnails of requested content are downloaded. At that point, the user decides if he or she wants a full download. Clearly, there is significant enterprise potential for such an approach.

The structure of the mobilized environment will change during the next several years. Frank Gillett, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, says that the enterprises and independent software vendors must strike a balance between what is done on the local device and what is done in the more powerful data center, wherever in the cloud it is located. "The reality is that we are going to need some of each," he says. "They must take advantage of each where each is appropriate."

The transition in the environment is tied to the increasing mobility of the populace. "The way this ties together is that as people become more mobile and rely more on smartphones, the PC and the laptop are not going away, they are just staying home more," says Citrix's Fleck. "Apps are installed on PCs. That's what is going to be moved to the cloud."