Enterprise mobile business apps a growing market

The mobile enterprise business applications market is offering up good potential for the reseller channel, with Strategy Analytics predicting the market will top US$40.5 billion this year, growing to $63.0 billion by 2020.

The advisory firm says mobile, social business, cloud and big data/analytics are increasingly influencing and impacting mobile business data apps adoption.

Gina Luk, Strategy Analytics mobile workforce strategies senior analyst and author of The State of the Mobile Enterprise Business Application Market report, says there is 'tremendous' pressure on businesses to make workers more productive with the increase in the mobile workforce radically changing the way business serves and interacts with its customers.

"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," Luk says.

She says 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," she says.

The report notes that mobility deployments are becoming increasingly sophisticated and many organisations have already deployed at least one mobile application.

SMS remains one of the dominant forms of mobile enterprise applications, however operator and MMS revenue declined during 2014 as data-enabled business mobile phone users continued to turn to free and feature rich, over the top instant messaging services.

Business process applications such as sales force automation, field force automation and other customer relationship management applications (marketing/analytics, contact centre, industry specific apps) have the second highest use overall among mobile workers.

At the other extreme, supply chain management, procurement, production and operations, and other enterprise resource planning applications (human resources, accounting, and payroll) have the lowest use overall among mobile workers.

The report also suggests 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.

Consumer demand for ubiquitous communications and OTT IM are higher than ever and are also having an impact with BYOD growth.