JUNE 2010 | VOL. 3 | ISSUE 1    CONNECT ANALYST INSIGHT Mobile Enterprise Applications: 2010 Trends to Watch   By Jeanine Sterling Senior Industry Analyst, Mobile and Wireless Communications Frost & Sullivan North American businesses are steadily waking up to the hard-dollar benefits of premium mobile applications. During 2010, the following trends will continue to take shape: Centralized Approach to Mobility Management As a company's mobility environment becomes more complex, IT executives will increasingly realize that internal management processes need to become more centralized. While a silo approach to ordering, deploying, and budgeting for various mobile applications and devices may have made sense initially, enterprise executives are discovering that they have little coordinated visibility into their enterprise's growing portfolio of mobile assets, mobile budgets and contracts with mobile vendors. Security of information will also remain a critical concern—and one that is best addressed from a centralized management standpoint. As a result, an increasing number of CIOs will embrace emerging premium mobile enterprise applications as part of their overall mobile management platform, instead of as standalone silo efforts. These developments are part of an overall trend toward more strategic planning around mobility in the workplace. One Stop Shop For certain types of businesses (large and small), utilizing a single interface to provide the complete application solution is an attractive and economical proposition. An increasing number of vendors and channels will position themselves as one-stop shops, offering an end-to-end enablement process that includes hardware provisioning and fulfillment, 24/7 support, and assuming the role of single-point-of-contact with other value chain participants. Appealing to the SMB sector When it comes to premium mobile applications for business, deployment by the SMB segment (fewer than 500 employees) has remained consistently and significantly lower than by the Large Enterprise (500+ employees) segment. In the Frost & Sullivan annual Enterprise Applications Survey, Large Enterprises are three to four times more likely than SMBs to utilize premium mobile applications. For Mobile Office applications, the most mature category discussed, Large Enterprises are twice as likely as SMBs to deploy. During the coming year, mobile application vendors and channels are expected to ratchet up their efforts to appeal to smaller companies. More convenient demo and pilot opportunities will help to neutralize concerns around value-add and user friendliness. Simpler offers and pricing mechanisms will help address smaller budgets. And creative assistance with hardware purchases—which can present a prohibitively expensive upfront cost—will begin to counteract the "cost of implementation" barrier that is cited by the majority of SMBs when explaining the reasons behind non-deployment. Customer Satisfaction as a Key Selling Point While high ROI will remain a clear hard-dollar benefit for many of the premium mobile applications, the softer non-cost benefits of these applications will receive more attention and promotion during 2010. "Increased customer satisfaction" is being cited by a large segment of companies as the primary metric for measuring the success of these applications. Expansion into New Departments and Throughout Company A hefty percentage of companies that have already deployed premium mobile applications plan to expand their utilization during the next 12 months. This bodes well for already-established vendors and is a testament to the effectiveness of the earlier versions of these applications. With additional capabilities being introduced and with more feature-rich devices to match, the next generation of services will experience significantly increased adoption within the current customer base. Continued Verticalization New vertical-specific versions of established brands will continue to be introduced. These new offers will likely exist side-by-side with more horizontal applications. High-potential industry segments include: health care, transportation, financial services, government and utilities. Continued Quest for Optimal Monetization Model(s) Mergers, acquisitions, and the simple exit of weaker value chain participants will help to consolidate revenues into something resembling a viable long-term business model. New pricing and distribution paradigms introduced by Apple and Google and various forms of on-device application storefronts in the consumer sector will begin to have greater impact in the enterprise sector, loosening the carriers' tight grip on revenue distribution ... if only at first for the entry-level services available to smaller companies. However, the carriers' application pricing for larger enterprise applications is not expected to soften to any noticeable degree during the next twelve months. More Intelligent Data-mining The data spigot that is turned on by the premium mobile applications can be intimidating. Companies which previously had little to no visibility into mobile worker activities are in danger of transitioning from no information originating real-time in the field to too much available data once applications are put in place. It is possible to gather so much field information that it becomes problematic for a company to adequately manage and utilize the data. As a result, more forward-looking vendors are expected to provide integrated forecasting, planning, and analysis tools as optional services. Expanding SaaS Popularity With the credit-tightening impact of the current U.S. economy, the hosted Software as a Service model will continue to gain in popularity among all sizes of businesses. While they certainly have their advantages, in-house applications can require a substantial capital investment on the customer's part. Enterprises that are not well positioned to make capital expenditures can instead utilize their operations budgets to deploy much-needed mobile applications within their sales and field service workforces. In addition, hosted solutions can be deployed more quickly, efficiently reacting to market needs. They also do not require the same level of internal expertise and skills (a key barrier to deployment on the part of many customers) and tend to be more flexible in terms of adjusting to a customer's dynamic hardware and software needs. For more information about Frost & Sullivan's work with Mobile Enterprise Applications,contact jessica.gordon@frost.com We Want Your Input Subscribe Me Subscribe a Friend Forward to a Friend  Connect with Open Text   World Kitchen Cooks Up ROI How World Kitchen enhances SAP business processes with the Open Text ECM Suite. Put Your Digital Assets to Work Wit h the launch of Open Text Media Management 7, professional marketers, broadcast/entertainment firms and publishing companies can reduce costs and streamline their creative process. Boost Productivity with Open Text Everywhere With the launch o f Open Text Everywhere, enterprises can boost productivity by making content and processes available on smartphones. 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