By Roger Dewey

I spent most of September traveling across the EU and UK, meeting with customers, prospects, and other participants in the mobile telecom ecosystem. Those discussions reinforced a growing belief of mine — that we’re at a genuine inflection point. There are real opportunities for growth and disruption in the mobile enterprise communications space.

Since the early days of 2G, enterprises have looked to mobile communications as a way to make operations more efficient — from early M2M applications to the connected world of IoT. Yet, as enterprise IT teams quickly discovered, the “mobile internet” isn’t really one seamless global network. It’s a patchwork of extranets connected through roaming technology and commercial agreements.

Add to that the lack of configurable tools for enterprises to tailor the mobile network to their specific needs — or even monitor and manage their devices across multiple operators — and it’s no surprise that specialized M2M and IoT MVNOs emerged to fill the gap. Useful, yes, but not especially efficient or flexible.

Over the past few years, the mobile industry has made impressive progress. Network capabilities are evolving rapidly, and carriers are making strong cases for mobile as a viable, cost-effective alternative to Wi-Fi and other connectivity options for private networks and IoT.

Yet one fundamental issue remains: there are still no pre-integrated, configurable tools that let enterprise IT departments easily build, adapt, and manage mobile solutions around their unique requirements. This gap persists largely because of the Innovator’s Dilemma — the ecosystem’s major customers, large MNOs, prefer vendors to “keep doing what they do, only cheaper.” Standards like SGP.32 are being adopted, but the business models and control remain tightly held by operators.

For the enterprise, that’s a bit like having a powerful computer and operating system that gets better every year — but no configurable software like Microsoft Office to truly make it useful.

That’s why I’m so energized by what I’ve seen across Europe. There’s a resurgence of innovation — not just in hardware or networks, but in how enterprises, developers, and solution providers are thinking about flexibility, openness, and control. New approaches are emerging that will finally allow enterprises to shape mobile connectivity around their needs, rather than the other way around.

We’re entering a period where the tools for innovation on the SIM and at the network edge are catching up with enterprise expectations. The conversations I had this month confirmed it: the next wave of enterprise mobility is about to begin, and it’s going to be driven by software, configurability, and choice.

At Able Device, this is exactly where SIMbae™️ comes in. It provides the missing layer of configurability — turning the SIM into a programmable, intelligent software engine that enterprises and solution providers can easily adapt to their use cases. From seamless public–private network transitions to enhanced security and quality of service, SIMbae enables the flexibility and control that have long been missing from mobile enterprise communications. It’s exciting to see how quickly the market is now ready for this kind of innovation — and even more exciting to be part of making it happen.