The debate about handset support in the Mobile UC space has officially been put to rest, according to a recent VoIPPlanet article covering DiVitas’ BYO (Bring Your Own) phone launch.

DiVitas’ Mobile Unified Communications (Mobile UC) solution is now available as a nimble web-client that can run on any browser-enabled smartphone, such as iPhone, Blackberry and Android

In his article DiVitas's Mobile UC Now Available on the Latest Devices, VoIPPlanet’s Ted Stevenson writes:

“DiVitas Networks today made an announcement that pretty much sews up [the number of supported handsets] competition for good (or perhaps makes it irrelevant going forward).”

He explains, “the flashy way to state what they've done would be something along the lines of: 'DiVitas's technology now works with the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android phone—not to mention the desktop PC.' While those are the big attention-getters, in reality what they've done is to make their technology compatible with any device that runs a Web browser—a number that's growing every day.

He quotes DiVitas CEO Vivek Khuller as saying, the market reality that set the company on the development path that ended with today's announcement was the overwhelming predominance of what they are calling "Bring Your Own" phones. "We [started with] the notion that the mobile devices would be bought by the enterprise and distributed to the employees," Khuller told EnterpriseVoIPplanet. "The reality is that people pick their own phones. People pick their own plans, their own carriers.”

According to Stevenson, DiVitas has answered the call for a new approach to enterprise mobility. “Rather than negotiating with owners of 'closed,' proprietary operating systems in order to gain the access necessary to write native applications for more devices, why not build a way to accomplish the same end using a piece of open technology that's already on the device?

According to Stevenson’s analysis of DiVitas’ BYO phone announcement: “Not only does this vastly enlarge the potential market universe that DiVitas can address (nice for them), it makes the benefits of mobile unified communications (cost savings and enhanced communications efficiency), available to many kinds of organizations that would be unable (or simply unwilling) to try to impose on their end users the kind device uniformity that would have been required heretofore.

Citing an example of the perfect BYO customer, Stevenson quotes Ron Hutchins, CTO of Georgia Institute of Technology, "Universities constitute one of the most diverse handset ecosystems, where IT has minimal control over selection of handsets or carriers by students," he said. "With support for iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry, DiVitas would be able to offer handset and carrier choice that would be very appealing in a college campus environment."