Entner added, "What they are doing is a good idea, but to pull it off, they have to be agnostic about the technology and even the carriers they recommend."

Recommending another carrier than Sprint to a customer might be hard for the subsidiary, especially if the competing carrier joins a project and starts pushing Sprint Enterprise Mobility "against the wall," he said.

Entner projects enormous cell phone and wireless data growth in coming years, although he said the professional services market for mobility applications is "not very large today" and is perhaps US$200 million annually. Overall, the wireless industry in the U.S. contributed about $92 billion to the U.S. gross domestic product in 2004, and will be bigger than the U.S. automobile industry within five years, Entner said in a recent report he wrote for the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association, a Washington-based industry trade group.

Neither analyst believes another cellular provider will jump into mobility professional services, at least right away, giving the new subsidiary some room to attract customers.

In July, Sprint Nextel announced Sprint Mobility Business Assessment, a consulting service that provided customers an audit of current wireless deployments and recommendations for optimizing their investments. That unit has been folded into the Sprint Enterprise Mobility subsidiary and will become the initial part of the service that is offered, Halbert said.