Verizon's dual-persona system will be available for more than one major mobile operating system and will complement the carrier's Private Applications Store for Business, announced on Monday.

Offering both will give enterprises more options for securing the applications and data that their employees use, said Janet Schijns, [cq] vice president of Verizon's Business Solutions Group.

Dual-persona systems have been gaining traction slowly but appear ready to make a leap forward this week as the U.S. mobile industry gathers for the CTIA Enterprise & Applications trade show in San Diego. VMware tapped into its enterprise virtualization expertise to late last year. On Monday, AT&T , based on technology from Enterproid, which will set up dual personas on mobile devices running Version 2.2 and later of the Google Android OS. It is scheduled to be available by the end of this year.

Offering only a dual-persona system could force enterprises to port their existing apps to another OS or adapt them to work with the segmented device software, so Verizon will also offer private app stores that work on any mobile OS and any carrier, Schijn said.

The Private Applications Store for Business lets businesses create app stores with just the devices their employees or partners need, tuned for the privileges and needs of specific departments and users. They can include both internally and externally developed apps, and IT administrators can pull apps from the store or make them inaccessible on a user's device when necessary, Schijn said.