Mobile Office Market Will Cease to Be a Major Enterprise Driver- Leaving Few Survivors
The 451 Group believes that over the next 12-24 months the mobile office market will converge and, aside from Research In Motion (RIM) and a small number of overall survivors, will cease to be a significant direct driver of mobile deployment activity in the enterprise. 451 analysts believe the opportunity has gone (or is going), at least for the technology 'pure plays.'
"Other than RIM, most of the vendors currently vying for a piece of the mobile office market have discovered that making direct enterprise sales is tough to pull off," said Tony Rizzo, Director of Research, Enterprise Mobile Technology Practice at The 451 Group. "It's gotten to the point where most of them have turned to the wireless carriers to open doors - and most of those doors will be in the consumer space."
While several vendors peg the global market for mobile users at roughly 600 million, The 451 Group's estimate of the market for enterprise users is just one-tenth of that, or 60 million. Of that total, 451 analysts believe the overall upper market range for mobile email utilizing smartphones and other converged devices (e.g., BlackBerry, Treo, Motorola Q, etc.) is closer to 20 million premium-level users. The remaining 540 million non-enterprise users can be classified as either 'prosumers' (estimated to be less than 5%, or about 27 million, of the potential subscribers) or pure consumers. Pure consumers are more than satisfied with mobile interfaces to their commercially available accounts (e.g., Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo), which require nothing more than a suitable mobile device interface.
The 451 Group believes that consumers are not interested in paying for anything more robust, and in fact younger generations of users are likely to bypass email altogether in favor of text messaging.
Of the 27 million likely global prosumers, 451 analysts believe that at least 25% of them will turn to either RIM or directly to Microsoft or IBM (most likely through a carrier-based subscription offer). That leaves approximately 20 million prosumers for the rest of the formal mobile office vendors to go after.
"Is this enough of a marketplace to generate sufficient revenue for the existing mix of vendors? We don't believe so," said Rizzo. "While there is room here for a few third-party vendors, the mobile office market does not look to us to be quite the 600-million-user marketplace that it might seem at first glance.""
Posted to the site on 25th May 2007