The excitement that surrounds mobility, and indeed anything that jets into the realm of BYOD (bring your own device) or COIT (consumerization of IT), has been drowning out--perhaps thankfully--the more pedestrian topic of enterprise mobility. The latter usually travels with notions of policy enforcement, security, compliance, and its attendant futile resistance (or reluctant acceptance). In other words, IT is the buzz kill.

Step out of the confines of the typical MDM (mobile device management) drudgery for a moment, and allow me to introduce Framehawk, a promising young company that takes a decidedly different approach to the enterprise mobile problem. In essence, by taking the promise of VDI for mobile and adding secret sauce, Framehawk removes the tedium of VDI's screen refresh and imprecise mobile gesture interactions.

The idea is to provide a native mobile experience for end users, with all of the security and low cost of VDI, said Peter Badger, Framehawk CEO and co-founder.

Add in some flexibility in the form of programming tools (hooks into iOS and Android SDKs) that let an application team add a more mobile friendly skin (or, with even more work, re-do the entire user experience without touching the back end application.) Now you've got the ability to take legacy applications (that you've already invested in heavily) to your mobile workforce quickly.

By focusing on the enterprise application, Framehawk may obviate the need for MDM, Badger said.

In the video embedded below, from our Valley View live Web TV show, you can see a demonstration of a few applications, including a Windows app that updates financial market data in real time, a re-skinned version of Salesforce.com where the data sits behind the corporate firewall (rather than getting downloaded to the device), and a corporate intranet. Badger couldn't really show any of its various customer applications, for obvious reasons, but he did discuss one of them: the Swiss bank, UBS.