Speaking at a round table event in London yesterday, Nick Webb, head of solutions marketing at Vodafone Global Enterprise (VGE), said that the company is currently conducting trials on dual persona, and hopes to make the technology available to customers later this year.

Dual persona, also known as mobile virtualisation, has been touted as a way to enable the . It works in the same way as desktop virtualisation, using a hypervisor to support multiple domains on the same hardware.

Users can keep all their enterprise data and applications in one domain, which is provisioned and managed by the IT department, and create a separate domain for all their other applications, games and contacts - thereby retaining privacy and control of their personal mobile environments.

Telefnica, parent company of UK mobile operator O2, announced plans earlier this year to launch a dual persona service, powered by technology, and companies such as and also offer their own versions of the technology.

"Dual persona devices are starting to gain credence," said Webb. "We are experimenting with different options - making the service native to the device or finding a way to split everything. We will go as far as splitting the billing eventually."