I get the appeal of a virtual SIM but I don't get the smartphone part. I'm curious, when would I need a service like that?
All bets off with Cophone.
Most companies don't care about anything but price. The rest is largely theatre, particularly outside the tightly-regulated sectors like healthcare and banking.
Even the US DOD is using the cloud for email storage.
It's not unreasonable to see a solution like this evolve into an on-premise hosted solution.
The cloud definitely is someone else's computer.
If I need the company laptop to access my virtual smartphone, then what's the point? At that point I might as well just use the laptop to do what I need to do. Which defeats the purpose, because it's not mobile.
Also you cannot lose your work phone as you would with a physical one. Which might be interesting for your employer if you handle sensitive data.
The longer term plan is to also provide an app that you could install and therefore achieve the same mobility. This would be the only work app you would have to install on your personal mobile phone in order to access your work phone. This is still in brainstorming phase.
It's a really elegant solution IMO.
Probably there are also people who'd like to get rid of their smartphone entirely so this pose as a solution to the ever growing dependency on such devices, be it exclusive bank or other apps, some forms of verification and others.
Admittedly I didn't look into it much but I assume we're talking about physical devices, which likely holds true by the cost of the subscription as well as the considerable challenge of misrepresenting a virtual device for a real one, in which case the service looses any actual appeal.