Research from O2 suggests that corporate mobile spend will grow eight times faster than conventional IT investment in 2005, as a third of enterprises plan to increase mobile spend by 20% or more against an underlying IT growth trend of 2.5%.
A study conducted by Quocirca on behalf of O2 conducted interviews with 100 IT and communication decision makers from a cross-section of industries in the UK.
Many company mobile email and data trials initiated in 2004 will come to fruition in 2005. 70% of businesses surveyed already have one or more wireless project in place; and 70% now have some level of mobile email rollout across the organisation as a whole, with 28% achieving either widescale rollout or a significant level of rollout.
38% of businesses now have some kind of mobile access to other business systems, with a further 25% expecting this to become an active area in 2005.
Despite the broad consensus on the increasing value of mobile, no one platform standard or device looks set to dominate in the short term. Instead businesses are predicting the continued deployment of a wide range of devices that reflects the range of applications and business roles that mobile working now supports.
Over 60% of those businesses interviewed plan to deploy 3G/GPRS cellular cards for laptops, with 25% anticipating widespread use throughout the organisation.
A further 50% anticipate that Mobile Windows-based PDA or wireless PDAs based on another platform will be deployed to some extent across the organisation, whilst over 40% expect to deploy BlackBerry for both email and other applications.
Interestingly for operators’ enterprise strategies, over 70% of businesses are looking for tactical advice from operators on how to get the best from wireless devices and applications, while 30% are seeking broader strategic advice on technology and services.