A group of top enterprise vendors has launched a new industry  initiative at the Mobile World Congress this morning with the goal of establishing a common standard for how workers access company data from their smartphones and tablets. The effort aims to remove the trade-offs currently involved in the process.

Organizations today have two main options for regulating mobile apps on employee-owned devices. The first is limiting users to choosing from a selection of pre-vetted services on a private catalog, which affords administrators full control over usage but can hinder productivity. The alternative is bolting an external management layer onto applications to artificially enforce policies, an approach that offers freedom of choice at the expense of additional complexity and doesn’t always achieve the intended purpose.

The ACE group proposes a better way of going about the challenge. The VMware Inc.-backed consortium has produced a framework that aims to provide a central point of control across all the mobile apps connected to the network, whether internally developed or not. It enables an organization to specify the conditions under which services must operate  in a common definition that is automatically applied to every supported application.

The developers making the apps, meanwhile, gain the ability to simply embed the framework’s pre-built functionality into their code instead of having to spend time and effort implementing similar features from scratch. The more services that integrate with the technology, the more companies will embrace it, which should in turn attract additional support.

The backers of ACE are banking on that dynamic to help drive the adoption of the framework. But while the initiative has garnered the endorsement of several top app makers including Box Inc. and Workday Inc., VMware subsidiary AirWatch is currently the only enterprise mobility management (EMM) provider involved in the project.

The participation of the firm’s competitors, or the lack thereof, is what what will ultimately decide if the project is to become a true industry standard. ACE is theoretically interpretable with “all” EMM solutions, but as the recent controversy over the efforts of VMware’s sister company to standardize Hadoop has proven, openness alone is not a guarantee for support.