Corporate Mobility Becomes Mainstream and Outlines the Shape of the Future with Mobile Business 2.0. Part 3

Gartner: The most significant trends shaping the Wireless and Mobile industry. The most significant trends in the wireless and mobile industry that will affect people during the next five years.

5. Consumerisation The growing integration of mobile and wireless technologies into every aspect of life; home, office, home office, family, car and recreation, present both risks and opportunities for the enterprise. Technologies such as WiFi, 'smart' mobile phones, mobile wireless enabled personal digital assistants (PDAs), as well as consumer software like Google Desktop and Skype, have steadily infiltrated the enterprise, and are posing security risks to corporate data. If organisations do not provide these facilities to its workforce, employees will embrace them anyway, which also present a huge risk. Banning consumer technology from employee-owned devices is unrealistic, unverifiable and naive. Banning consumer tools is also counter productive, because employee's experiments will discover new ways to perform tasks in new and effective ways. Prevention will stifle innovation, so companies should educate their employees about the risks, define policies and be prepared to invest promptly in corporate solutions when users discover valuable applications. 6. Growth of Smartphones As smartphones become widely available, medium-cost devices capable of delivering simple thin and thick client corporate applications, they will increasingly be used as business tools and evaluated by IT managers. This will challenge vendors to offer viable devices that address corporate deployment requirements. Smartphone prices will fall, driven by new single processor phones, making smartphones accessible to a much wider population of consumer and business users. In addition, it means that a much higher audience of consumers and enterprises will be able to afford a mobile device that can run sophisticated applications. Gartner predicts that smartphone sales in Western Europe will grow at a 49 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2005 and 2009. By 2009, one in three mobile handset phones will be a smartphone.

Gartner Wireless and Mobile Summit

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