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Are mobile phones pointless? "It's the applications, stupid!"

"What's the next cool handset device?" - It's a stupid question, a ridiculous question, says Rakesh Mahajan, head of mobility at BT Global. "It's the applications, stupid!" he told an audience during his NetEvents keynote in Barcelona today.

Mobility, said Mahajan, who likes to be called Raki, is hard. "Mobile is simple, it's phones. Enterprise mobility is hard. That's why we don't do it; we don't understand it." Naturally, he doesn't mean that BT Global doesn't understand it; he means the world's Chief Information Officers don't.

Also, he said, he means the mobile phone industry. "Take the example of the way we sell to the oil and gas industry," Mahajan said. "These have a workforce problem; all their experienced guys are getting older and older. They are people who are aged 60 plus, and who don't want to work on an oil rig in the middle of an ocean."

The oil industry's problem, Raki says, is that the people on the oil rigs lack experience, and the people who have the experience are sitting on farms, relaxing. "So how do younger guys access their experience when it's on a farm, not on the oil rig? Not by buying a mobile phone."

"So the real question is: 'Why don't we give these guys some high speed tools to get packets of information from the rig to the farm?' and we know that we as an industry can address this problem; but we haven't. We didn't because we didn't understand it. Now that we have learned to understand, we can increase revenues for our customers," he concluded sagely.

As usual at a NetEvents summit, the wisdom of the keynote speaker isn't always accepted at face value; delegates give you a hard ride. Raki gave other examples - for one, he reckoned the right applications and business analysis could reduce the amount of time it takes for a nurse to get medicine to a patient. And he suggested that retail banks could do "queue-bashing" by giving UMPCs to the "greeters", and letting them deal with quick-and-simple problems on the spot. But the device, he suggested, is only important in that it has to be capable of doing the job.

So does this mean the handset doesn't matter? Not at all, suggested consultant Dean Bubbley of Disruptive Analysis. "The user will simply not accept a handset if it doesn't meet their personal requirements. They'll get a handset of their own, and carry both."

It doesn't matter, said Raki. "Corporate trends show that this isn't important. The corporate customer is moving away from a DIY model for their mobility strategy, and are looking towards the systems integrators (like BT Global!) and their solutions." Well, he would say that, wouldn't he.

But there is another trend, pointed out your reporter: large corporates are turning themselves into virtual mobile network operators.

It's not something the operators themselves like, thinks Raki: "We don't see the operators saying: you should be a VNO. They are trying to address needs of large corporates. And on voice, they are well suited to meet these needs; but on data, they are struggling. Corporates want billing tools, they want provisioning tools, they want transparency of what the network is doing."

Which, of course, is why the corporates are trying to be VNOs.

And is mobility really hard? Steve Broadhead, of Broadband Testing says it isn't. "OK," agreed Raki Taki Sagi. "It isn't hard, but it's harder than just putting a phone in a shop window and saying 'cheap minutes!' and seeing who buys it."