Dave Rothschild, vice president of HP’s handheld business unit, argued that since a corporate customer’s handheld infrastructure will almost inevitably vary in terms of devices, applications, bearer (GSM, CDMA and WiFi) and even carrier, the market opportunity for HP is to help accelerate the deployability of their mobile infrastructure, with the flexibility to customize it for their specific requirements.

This implies a mixture of services, both internal and with systems intergrator partners, software like the OpenView network management portfolio, and hardware, be it the servers on the network side or connected iPAQ handhelds on the device side.

However, since both the software and hardware environments within corporate customers will almost certainly be heterogeneous, it is clearly the service engagement that will tie it all together.

It’s just like our services group manages Sun hardware in the data center, he said.

The Managed Mobility Services portfolio recently launched by HP promises end-to-end management of an entire mobile ecosystem, including devices, email, secure wireless connectivity, applications and carrier relationships.

In particular, it offers device management with access and ID management, service provisioning, security and remote deletion of data, as well as application management, with provisioning, patch management and version updates, and email.

The Hosted Enterprise Managed Mail offering is, of course, made in conjunction with Microsoft Corp, whose operating systems underscore HP’s own handheld devices, but also whose ActiveSync technology for pushing Exchange data is also licensed to both Symbian Ltd and, separately, to the largest Symbian device vendor, Nokia Corp.

Rothschild referred to the standard wisdom that mobile email drives usage, and that once more corporate users enjoy the benefits of mobile email, they start looking beyond it and asking for more apps to be mobilized.

In that context too HP’s partnership with Microsoft stands to pay dividends, he said, in that there are only two app development models, .NET and Java, so ISVs can use their development tools, then we can help make the apps deployable, reliable and available.

Of course, while HP can come in with the third iteration of its connected PDA, the iPAQ 6900, which boasts WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and cellular connectivity, though there is one gap there, in that it currently has only the GSM line of cellular (i.e. GPRS, W-CDMA and HSDPA).

Rothschild acknowledged that there is an opportunity for us in CDMA, because there are enterprises that have standardized on a CDMA carrier, but so far we’ve focused on GSM, just as Palm focused initially on CDMA for its Window Mobile device.

He would not be drawn on whether HP has any plays to offer a CDMA version of the 6900, and as to the possibility of offering both the main cellular radio access modes in one iPAQ, as Samsung and some other smart phone manufacturers already do in their devices, Rothschild wondered how big a market is there for that kind of device and what kind of premium you’d have to pay for it?