Mobile Enterprise Applications Gaining Steam
This was the central theme of a panel discussion held Tuesday at Interop-New York entitled "Mobilizing Email and Messaging." Industry experts identified key growth markets for mobile applications and discussed the advantages they bring to business processes.
The U.S. mobile email market will reach 10 million users within a year, and 25 million in two years, predicted Rick Hartwig, director of product management at Good Technology, Santa Clara, Calif.
Strong global adoption of mobile email is what's behind this growth, said Jeff Damir, vice president of sales and business development at mobile email software vendor Seven Networks, Redwood City, Calif. He said the more mobile email catches on in different countries, the more inclined handset makers will be to improve the platforms that run the applications. "If the interest was limited to one geographical area, that wouldn't happen," Damir said. Despite the strong growth, Damir said there is a still lot of room for improvement. Even if the market for mobile email applications reaches 100 million people within four years, that would still only represent 5 percent of the 2 billion user market worldwide, he noted.
Dave Grannan, general manager of mobile email, Nokia Mobility Solutions, is bullish on mobile email and other applications. Nokia estimates the global smartphone market will surpass 250 million handsets by 2008, and the company expects to sell more than 25 million smartphones this year, according to Grannan. He added that Nokia will have incorporated email capability into its entire line of phones by this time next year.
"Mobile email is the kind of productivity tool that business users are beginning to see as a necessity for doing their job," Grannan said.
In addition to providing their workers with secure access to corporate email, companies are increasingly looking to provide mobile access to corporate intranet and sales force automation applications that allow salespeople to access back-office databases while in the field, Hartwig said. Fixed mobile convergence is another technology with big implications for the enterprise, Grannan said. By Q1 of next year, Nokia phone users will be able to make calls over enterprise Wi-Fi networks using IP PBX functionality, Grannan said. "We see those technologies as an intersection for the business market, and this will contribute to the evolution of tighter voice and data applications."
The steady growth of mobile device users has the additional benefit of streamlining corporate administration processes, which is particularly noticeable in functions such as accounting, said Dave Werezak, vice president of the enterprise business unit at Research In Motion, Waterloo, Ontario.
"The hidden gem of mobile devices is the fact that when people have handhelds with them all the time, slow processes become faster ones," Werezak said.
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