Applications market will top $40.5 billion in 2015 and grow to $63 billion by 2020
2014 saw continued growth in the mobile enterprise business software market as the increase in the mobile workforce is radically changing the way the companies serve and interact with its customers, according to a new report.
Enterprises are more receptive to employees bringing their own personal devices into the work environment and syncing them with the enterprise back end applications and work processes, showed Strategy Analytics’ study, ‘The State of the Mobile Enterprise Business Application Market’.
Consumer demand for ubiquitous communications and over the top (OTT) instant messaging (IM) is higher than ever and is also having an impact on bring your own device (BYOD) growth, the report stated.
Yet SMS is still one of the key dominant forms of mobile enterprise applications, although operator SMS and MMS revenue declined further during 2014 as data-enabled business mobile phone users continued to turn to ‘free and feature rich’ OTT IM services.
According to Gina Luk, senior analyst for mobile workforce strategies, and author of the report: “There is tremendous pressure on businesses to make workers more productive. Throughout 2015 companies rolled out new mobile, social, cloud and Big Data analytics-based business applications to help deal with changing customer, employee, and partner expectations.”
As the corporate workforce becomes increasingly mobile, the IT department’s role has unquestionably transitioned from a control to an enablement function. “Both of these issues create a lot of opportunity and the need for new software and processes,” Luk added.
The report showed that organisations’ mobility deployments are increasingly sophisticated, and many have already deployed at least one mobile application.
Business process applications such as sales force automation (SFA), field force automation (FFA) and other customer relationship management (CRM) applications such as marketing, analytics, contact centre, and industry specific apps, have the second highest use overall among mobile workers.
While supply chain management, procurement, production and operations, and other enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications such as human resources, accounting, and payroll have the lowest use overall among mobile workers.
