Mobile World Congress (MWC), the world's largest wireless trade show, has never been explicitly about business mobility and never will be. In the past, trying to unearth events, announcements and activities from the show that will directly impact enterprise mobility was like trying to find a needle in a haystack--or at least like searching for an enterprise application among the thousands in Apple's iPhone App Store. With that in mind, there were some announcements that had some direct implications for business mobility, and others that will more subtly impact the segment. Three key themes emerged from the show that will continue to influence enterprise mobility: The continued consumerization of the enterprise, especially in the smartphone market; the emergence of 4G and implications for new business applications; and the expansion of M2M business models to unearth the transformative power of mobility for enterprises.

RIM and Microsoft both acknowledge the increasing consumer influence in the enterprise

RIM announced its BES Express server offering at MWC, which requires no server or client access license (CAL) fees. It is essentially freeware to connect BlackBerry devices to Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft Windows Small Business Server. BES Express is a scaled-back version of the company's traditional BES product, offering a reduced number of IT policies (35-plus versus more than 450 for BES) and without some additional capabilities, such as over-the-air BlackBerry activation, support for mobile voice service and enterprise messaging and collaboration add-ons.

Why this approach? BES Express serves two purposes for RIM. First, it is an acknowledgment that while many businesses don't require the robustness that traditional BES offers, they may still want a manageable and secure platform to connect smartphones. Second, it acts as a competitive response to "free" connectivity solutions available in the market, most notably Microsoft ActiveSync, which allows several smartphone OSs outside of Windows Mobile (iPhone, Nokia E series, etc.) to connect with Exchange. RIM is essentially removing cost as a barrier to entry for companies that haven't deployed BES but want to support BlackBerry.

Perhaps more importantly, however, RIM is hoping to capitalize on the increasing consumer penetration of BlackBerry and BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) offerings. With BES Express, users no longer need a BlackBerry Enterprise service plan from their wireless operator, but can instead use their existing BIS plan to connect to corporate email. RIM's hope is that this will encourage companies that already have BES deployments for corporate-liable BlackBerry smartphones to use BES Express to expand corporate email support to employees who want to bring their own, individually purchased BlackBerry to work.

In one of the most anticipated, and therefore least surprising announcements, Microsoft unveiled its plans for Windows Phone 7, it's latest iteration of its smartphone OS (or the artist formerly known as Windows Mobile). While there is still much unknown about what Windows Phone 7 will look like and offer OEMs and developers, this much is clear: Microsoft is willing to break from the past to offer an OS and user interface that will likely more closely resemble offerings from Apple, Palm and Android than previous iterations of Windows Mobile.

What are the implications for the enterprise? First, Windows Phone 7 will likely be positioned not as a mobilized version of the Windows desktop OS, but more of pure mobile OS. This is a good thing for Microsoft: It is finally acknowledging that mobile is different from the desktop world and needs to be architected from a mobile-centric point of view. It may be bad for both developers and enterprises in the short-term, however, as it appears many applications developed for Windows Mobile may not be easily ported to Windows Phone 7.

With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft is shifting its approach to the smartphone market and clearly acknowledging the growing consumer influence on smartphone purchasing. In the past, Microsoft had counted on its presence within the business market and its sway among IT decision-makers to grow its mobile OS market share. It continues to lose ground in the enterprise market, however, to RIM and Apple iPhone.

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