As wireless technology becomes more reliable and secure, enterprises are not only seeking to expand their use of it, but also looking to carriers and their partners to provide hosted and managed services.

Kitty Weldon, principal analyst for U.S. enterprise mobility at Current Analysis, said that the enterprise space still represents untapped opportunity for carriers, which typically take a consumer view. The top three national carriers, she said, are all taking different approaches: Sprint Nextel Corp. is aggressive in professional services and customer work, Verizon Wireless is selling straight wireless service, and AT&T Mobility is somewhere in between.

When it comes to applications and managed services, Weldon said, the market is very fragmented and filled with small players, and carriers have “a huge revenue opportunity.”

Butch Musselman, VP of industry business solutions for Sprint Nextel Corp., said that GPS tracking and location-based applications are generating the most interest across the board. Uses for GPS applications include alerting customers when a service technician is on the way and routing the nearest truck with the right parts and technician to make the repair, Musselman said. He summarized trends within various verticals that are expanding their use of wireless, including:

© Manufacturing: Manufacturers are seeking to replace old hardwired connections with wireless, Musselman said—for example, to allow mobility within a plant with a wireless laptop card and handset. Wireless telemetry for alerts and alarms is also growing in this sector, along with wireless management of assembly lines.

© Logistics: Companies “want the ability to simultaneously communicate with all their businesses and customers for just-in-time delivery,” Musselman said.

© Retail: Musselman said this area is moving beyond external wireless points of sale to the use of wireless connectivity inside the store, because it is cheaper than a conventional wireline connection.

© Banking: Wireless connections for temporary automatic teller machines placed at major events such as football games, as well as the use of wireless for fixed ATMs. “The other thing we’re seeing is the ‘bank branch in a box’—the entire branch is wireless,” Musselman said. This includes the use of wireless routers as well as handsets, which allows employees to leave the branch and stay connected as they seek out customers, rather than wait for a visit to the bank location.

Musselman said that the current interest in wireless is the culmination of a trend that started about three years ago and is being driven by the speed, low latency, and the security of new networks.

Andrea Caldini, executive director of business product management and development for Verizon Wireless, said that the company recently launched some virtual private network solutions in response to demands from customers who wanted private IP addressing for mobile devices.

She said that while there is a high awareness of the advantages of mobile technology among I.T. departments, those departments often find themselves so busy that they are increasingly seeking hosted or managed services.

“The I.T. groups are so busy, and they have so many things that they control that in some cases they’re looking for more managed solutions so they don’t have to now get resources to really be able to support the wireless rollout or infrastructure,” Caldini said.

Small businesses also request more hosted solutions, Caldini said, because they lack the I.T. resources to support rollouts of wireless However, Caldini said, business people outside of I.T. need to make a push to encourage adoption of mobile services—much as they did in adopting the BlackBerry.

According to Rob Woodbridge, president and CEO of Rove Mobile, the last six-to-nine months have shown an increase in the number of customers who are approaching the company about mobilizing their I.T. administrators, instead of the other way around.

The company provides software that allows I.T. administrators to use mobile devices such as Palm Pilots, BlackBerrys and Pocket PCs in order to access servers and perform administrative tasks remotely, instead of requiring access to a computer. The six-year-old company has more than 5,000 customers deployed, including more than 60% of the Fortune 500, according to Woodbridge.

He added that the company has been waiting for most of its six-year existence for the market to show such interest in mobility, and for devices to have such extensive capabilities.

“They’ve got the devices on their hips already. Push e-mail is standard in any device. Now it’s about what else it can do,” said Woodbridge. He said he expects the path to get even easier.

Selling mobile to enterprises, he said, is “easier than it was, but it’s still not at the point where it’s as easy as it will be.”

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