2011 Will Be a "Breakout" Year for Enterprise Mobile Applications
The CTIA Fall event wrapped up in San Francisco this past week and the message was loud and clear. The enterprise is going to be the next hot place for mobile and wireless over the next twelve months and beyond.
In fact, the CTIA even changed the name of the annual event to "Enterprise and Applications" this year, reflecting this enterprise focus and where the organization thinks the largest opportunities will be in 2011.
To provide a foundation for this thinking, here are some of the trends that will drive continued innovation and adoption in enterprise mobile computing going forward:
- Mobile operating system innovation is continuing at a fast pace thanks to competition, including Android, Blackberry, Apple's iOS, and Windows Phone 7, and much of these new features have significant enterprise relevance.
- Smartphone innovation is moving beyond consumers and into the enterprise now, as evidenced by new device launches such as Motorola's Android Pro, which takes on the Blackberry, currently the enterprise stalwart device.
- There are currently 61 million wireless devices on US networks, a number growing every day.
- Another $21 billion has been invested in wireless infrastructure by the industry the last twelve months.
- The success of the iPad is launching a new revolution in tablet computing, perhaps even more ideal for the enterprise than smartphones.
- The emergence of cloud computing, a major trend in the enterprise and ideally suite for mobile applications, will drive much enterprise mobile innovation.
- We are inching closer and closer to a 4G world as evidenced by LTE rollouts, where data throughput will be increased considerably, and latency significantly reduced.
- Human barriers to enterprise adoption such as IT and Executive Management are decreasing as these individuals are using wireless devices more and more in their own lives and are seeing the value and potential within the enterprise.
We have witnessed this uptick already in 2010 at StrikeIron, seeing our SMS Alerts and Notifications text messaging solution increase significantly in adoption in 2010. Text messaging is especially important when communicating with customers, employees, and others whose device types are not known, or where freedom of device type usage is encouraged. These types of SMS-based alerts and notifications can dramatically improve customer service, strengthen relationships with customers, and drive new business opportunities. And thanks to Web Services API solutions like ours, it is easy to integrate SMS capabilities into applications, Web sites, business processes, or anywhere else where a real-time notification could be beneficial.
2011 should be a very interesting year to watch for mobile computing in the enterprise.