Enterprise investment in mobility has picked up this year, as companies big and small focused on boosting their productivity and efficiency as the economy ramped up back to recovery in 2010.
According to Gartner, Asia Pacific enterprise IT spending is expected to rebound in 2010 with 10.6 percent growth, following a decline of 1.3 percent in 2009, This year, deployment and growth forecast of smartphones were stronger than ever.
At the same time, there is rising interest in tablets among companies. IDC said in a report published in early December that there will be 330 million smartphones sold worldwide and 42 million tablets. A survey conducted by ChangeWave which queried 1,641 business IT buyers in November shows that 7% of respondents said their company currently deploys tablets and 14% said their company will buy tablets in the first quarter of 2011.
As we enter 2011, we see a definitely upward trend and a strong uptake of smartphones and tablets among mobile workers. Here are our key predictions on the direction and dynamics of the enterprise mobility market in 2011.
Willingness to deploy smartphones and tablets among enterprises
This year will be the time when scenes of mobile workers using a smartphone and a tablet interchangeably will become commonplace. The debut of the tablet wave in 2010 attracted a great deal of attention in the enterprise mobility market due to its portability and affordability.
As more tablets with improved specifications are launched, there will be a rapid increase in demand from enterprises and their employees for a mobile device in compact size with a bigger screen, for video-conferencing, improved document-viewing/editing, web browsing and presentation quality. We foresee that tablets, paired and synced with smartphones, will be increasingly popular among mobile workforce next year.