Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
A new trinity is on the rise: Mobility, cloud computing and social media are set to become inextricably linked over the next few years, presenting both threats and considerable opportunities for enterprises. Together with powerful analytics tools, this combination will be central to unlocking and making better use of the wealth of data in companies’ systems.
Recent analyst reports demonstrate just how services are shifting toward data-centric mobility and the cloud, and many enterprises are leading the adoption. According to IDC, for the first time in a single quarter, more smartphones were sold than all other mobile handsets in the first three months of this year; vendors sold 216.2 million smartphones in the first quarter of 2013, representing 51.6% of total handset shipments. Gartner, meanwhile, forecasts that by 2016 two-thirds of the worldwide mobile workforce—some 40% of all employees—will own a smartphone, with tablets acting as the key accelerator to mobility.
The trend for employees to bring their own devices such as smartphones and tablets into the workplace has been well documented, and like it or not, many will be using them to engage in social media activities in addition to work-related tasks. Indeed, a new report from Informa Telecoms and Media shows stark evidence of the shift in device usage. According to the report, daily over-the-top (OTT) messaging traffic overtook daily peer-to-peer SMS traffic in terms of volume last year, driven by the uptake of platforms such as WhatsApp, widely used to send images, video and audio media messages. An average of 19.1 billion OTT messages were sent each day in 2012, compared with an average of 17.6 billion P2P SMS messages.
Such developments will undoubtedly present major challenges to enterprises, in terms of both technology and employee policies in areas such as security, device management, integration, compliance, governance and privacy. But there will also be considerable opportunities to harness the power of social media and mobile cloud services.
Social media can open up new avenues of communication and interaction among employees, customers and partners, and cloud services can provide the flexibility and cost-effectiveness to make social media a compelling prospect. Add in mobility, and there is the potential to greatly increase workforce productivity. Back-end cloud systems also promise greater integration with a wider range of services and applications, while analytics tools will enable enterprises to make better use of the increasing volumes of valuable data that reside in their systems.
But the revolution has only just begun. As mobile broadband networks become more widespread, and smartphones and tablets achieve even greater penetration, the combination of mobile, cloud and social media services will really begin to take off. Enterprises need to take action now to start putting in place more coherent and far-reaching mobility strategies and policies. If they do so, they can reap the benefits of this powerful trinity.
Fernando Alvarez is VP at Capgemini Mobile Solutions Practice Leader
