M-Business Application Infrastructure Types

To deliver a mobile solution, a large firm needs to first build an infrastructure. An infrastructure is made up of several different types of interrelated pieces. There are many different types of pieces-or, to use the industry jargon, enablers-that make up a typical mobile infrastructure. This categorization gives you a good sense of the mobile application infrastructure market today and where it is going.

At a very high level, mobile application infrastructure enablers can be segmented into four types:

• Application Gateway/Platform Providers. These provide user management services such as secure access, directories, and administration; communication services such as e-mail, messaging, and scheduling; portal services such as knowledge
  management, content aggregation, and personalization; and e-commerce services such as catalogs, transactions, and billing. Examples include Openwave and EveryPath.
• Mobile Application Service Providers (MASPs). These provide data center and infrastructure hosting services. Also called colocators, these companies rent equipment, space, and bandwidth to companies that don't want the hassle of creating the plumbing needed to host their own mobile sites. Hosting companies, called managed services providers (MSPs), take this a step further and maintain the infrastructure for large corporations. Examples include Aether and JP Mobile.
• Mobile Internet Service Providers (MISPs). These provide connectivity to link the devices to the Internet. Examples include general wireless carriers such as AT&T, specialized data carriers such as GoAmerica and Palm.Net, and resellers such as OmniSky.
• Mobile Application Enablers. These provide data and transaction security services such as Verisign, data synchronization services such as Synchrologic, and micro-database providers such as Sybase. This group also includes service, systems, and application integration providers.