Friday, December 10, 2010

Top 7 trends for enterprise mobility solutions market in 2011

NATICK, USA: VDC Research Group analysts announced today their predictions for the key trends anticipated to shape the 2011 enterprise mobility market.

The coming year is certain to be another exciting year for mobility with continued innovation and new capabilities occurring throughout the mobile ecosystem. 2011 will feature new upstarts, continued advancements on both the hardware and software fronts and new opportunities for businesses to empower their workforces.

Mobile is the Enterprise…The Enterprise is Mobile
Today, enterprise mobility is officially engrained in the fabric of the enterprise, and we expect the mobile worker will become "just another node on the network" in the not too distant future. Enterprise mobility is not just about empowering your own workforce, but also about the very nature of how organizations communicate – internally and with their customers.

VDC Research will be tracking many mobile initiatives during 2011, the most compelling of which include: mobilization of health records, digital video enabled evidence management solutions and the “empowered mobile customer.”

Emergence of Cloud-Optimized Mobile Solutions
In 2011, VDC expects to see the emergence of enterprise application stores offered as a managed service, complete with key application management, configuration and provisioning features. There will also be a growing opportunity for cloud-optimized mobile devices supporting enterprise applications that can operate in both connected and disconnected states.

Enterprises Embrace the Application Development Liberties of Next-Gen Mobile Platforms
The democratization of mobile application development—enabled by emerging mobile platforms (such as Android) and today’s micro-app mentality—is taking the enterprise by storm. Organizations have become enamored by the low-cost/low-risk approach of internally developing mobile applications to support specific workflows or use cases.

VDC expects these developments to enable entirely new mobile workflows that will become incremental opportunities for mobile solution providers.

Mobile Ecosystem Shakeup Impacting Points of Decision-Making Influence
Consolidation in high growth markets is not only typical, but predictable. VDC anticipates the significant M&A activity in mobile segments in 2010 to increase in the coming year. One of the more interesting developments to follow will be the activity among wireless carriers.

Recent acquisitions by carriers of enterprise mobility professional service organizations are a trend that should continue into 2011 as carriers look to shed their image as “dumb pipe” vendors.

Tick-Tock, Tick Tock: The Individual Liable Device as a Security Time Bomb
VDC estimates that as much as 45 percent of US enterprises are supporting some level of individual-liable devices, driven by the desire to cut mobile costs and avoid the tax compliance tracking requirements associated with corporate liable devices. However, many enterprises have rushed to adopt an individual-liable approach without a technology and security management strategy.

Many of the potential issues are a factor of mismanagement of these devices from an IT perspective and the lack of adequate and enforceable security policies. However, of equal importance, is the lack of appropriate education for employees – and corporate IT – on mobile security policies.

Rugged Becomes Relevant—Again
The consequences of the recent global recession and its impact on access to capital resulted in organizations adopting non-rugged (or less-rugged) devices in place of rugged mobile devices more suitable for the targeted applications. Perhaps as a result of this shift,

VDC tracked an increase in average failure rates of enterprise-deployed devices leading into 2010. Enterprises are taking note of these failure rates and device total cost of ownership is again a top-of-mind investment criteria.

Enterprise Applications Optimized for Touch Interface
A key initiative for many enterprise application vendors will be to invest more in UI designs that support a wider variety of input options, including touch. One factor that will only accelerate this development will be the influx of approximately 100 million Millennials (Gen Y) on the workforce.

These individuals have grown up with radically different experiences – and expectations – in terms of communications and computing solutions.

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