The cloud is gaining traction in the mobile enterprise market thanks to the desire to leverage cloud platforms to develop mobile applications and access corporate information from anywhere.

Verizon (NYSE: VZ) is one company keen on pushing the cloud in the mobility space. This week it expanded its existing relationship with SAP to jointly market and sell key pieces of Verizon's Managed Mobility portfolio, which includes mobile device management, security and a mobile services enablement platform, allowing businesses to access their on-premise and cloud-based SAP applications on a virtual basis via Verizon's business-class cloud.

AT&T detailed its plan to spend another $1 billion on enterprise services, including mobility and cloud services, while Research In Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) and Microsoft announced a partnership in March to create a new RIM-hosted BlackBerry enterprise service available for Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) Office 365 cloud computing suite.

RIM said the move will save corporate customers money, enhance security and increase the pace of new BlackBerry services rollouts. The partnership, which is still being tested but should go live in the next few months, will afford enterprises the option of moving management of their BlackBerry Enterprise Servers off-site to remote data centers that will connect via the cloud to RIM's servers. RIM expects about one-fourth of its large corporate customers to put their data into the cloud by the end of 2011 with that number rising to half by 2012.

While Verizon and SAP's partnership is still fairly new (the two announced a deal in March), Jeff Deacon, manager of Verizon's cloud business, said Verizon has seen net new business for both SAP and Verizon. "Over time, we'll begin to see more migrations of existing SAP workloads that companies have invested in," he said.  

SAP workloads are significantly cheaper on a multi-tenant cloud platform since the platform automates many manual tasks such as troubleshooting and automatic failover, Deacon added. "Part of what the program was designed for was to create templates so that it's a very repeatable product."

Michele Pelino, principal analyst with Forrester Research, said in a recent note that mobile cloud service deployment is expected to evolve in three stages. Today, we are in the mobile applications services stage, but the next evolution will "become more systemic in the corporation, and firms evolve their use of mobile cloud capabilities to include storage, security and billing capabilities," she said. The final stage of the evolution will mean that mobile cloud services become mobile cloud solutions created by a wide range of partnerships created by vendors in the mobile ecosystem.

I have a feeling the evolution will happen rather quickly in the enterprise mobility space given the relative immaturity of mobile applications and services in the enterprise. Enterprise mobility has become an investment priority, and given the growth promise, we should see some very creative startups looking to capitalize on this new market called mobile cloud solutions. - Lynnette