Enterprises have been waiting for mobility technologies to reach high functional standards and want to understand how mobility can impact their business processes before deploying them. Despite predicted growth in this market and interest in the technologies, so far it has mostly been early adopters that have been deploying mobility solutions with mobile e-mail leading the way. However, this is set to change over the next few years with mobility growing from an interesting idea to an essential part of the IT infrastructure.

A new report from Business Insights titled 'The Mobile Enterprise Market Outlook' analyses the trends in mobile enterprise technologies and suggests how they might shape the future of the mobile enterprise technology market. This report details the drivers and inhibitors to the uptake of mobile solutions and provides strategic advice on how to maximise sales and opportunities by considering the best options for vendors targeting the mobile enterprise.

Key Issues

The report looks at the increasing complexity and scope of the mobile enterprise market. This is driving the need for more centralised management of WLAN solutions and hence, vendors need to develop strong product differentiation. Furthermore, while access points are starting to become commodities, WLAN switches still offer considerable margin potential for vendors due to the more nascent nature of this section of the market. The report goes on to say that mobile device manufacturers and service providers should work to promote their phones as authentication devices in their own right to open up the potential for greater mPayment applications. It also reiterates that mobile security is still perceived to be an issue despite vendors' claims that it is not a problem. The report further states that the cost of deploying mobility solutions and a lack of understanding of all the associated costs is preventing enterprises from investing in this space. Only 5 percent of the IT managers surveyed said they were investing in mobility as their biggest IT project in 2006, illustrating that mobility investment is not typically the number one priority for majority of enterprises.

Key Findings

Revenues in the enterprise mobility market in Europe are expected to reach $33.28 billion in 2012, growing rapidly over the next five years from around $27.85 billion in 2006. North America will remain the largest market with regard to WLAN spending, with enterprises in the region investing over $500 million in related equipment in 2008. Global enterprise WLAN infrastructure revenues are expected to reach around $1.4 billion by the end of 2008 from $1.07 billion in 2006. After a slow start, VoWLAN handset revenues are set to reach $1.2 billion across North America and EMEA by the end of 2008. At this stage, 73 percent of handset revenues are expected to come from dualmode devices. ‘In the cloud’ security solutions remove much of the burden from the customer of putting security on individual devices and offer the possibility of numerous additional revenue streams.