Mobile email has been the first application beyond voice to gain significant traction among business users, with active subscribers globally now numbering in the tens of millions.
Other applications with broad appeal such as Internet/intranet access and file downloading and synchronisation have also begun to gain wide appeal.
However, applications with more niche appeal either to horizontal functions within companies or to particular vertical industries have failed so far to take off in the same way.Part of the reason has been the lack of a mass-market-friendly ecosystem including wireless carriers to get these applications into the hands of enterprises and their employees.
Large IT services companies and systems integrators have taken the early lead in deploying business applications to mobile devices, but these have mostly been large and complex custom deployments.
Easy-to-deploy, productised solutions have been few and far between, with small specialist software vendors struggling to gain a foothold due to their small scale and inadequate sales channels.However, at least in the US, these small ISVs are beginning to gain real traction by working in partnership with wireless carriers, and are tapping into the business market as a whole, which buys mobile solutions almost exclusively from those carriers.
This early growth in the market is providing important pointers in terms of the business models being built around those applications, the application families which are likely to have broadest appeal, and the roles and responsibilities of the various players within the broad ecosystem that is forming.