Hand-held device market will boom

There is little doubt that the use of smart hand-held devices – PDAs or smartphones – for remote access to business applications is now widespread. To date it has been primarily for white-collar workers accessing email. But there is good evidence from recent Quocirca research that the market is close to a tipping point – businesses are starting to extend access to other business applications, and the roll-outs now include blue-collar workers. This should lead to an increase in sales of smart hand-held devices and the software that enables them.

In the past it has been hard for resellers to capture large mobile deployment projects because adoption has been piecemeal. Activity was largely driven by executives purchasing their own hand-held devices and asking IT to enable them for email. But increasingly, mobile email access has been extended to non-executive employees – more than 70 per cent of businesses have at least some employees who access email from mobile devices. This represents a good opportunity for volume shipment of the hand-held devices themselves.

But an even greater opportunity opens up as the use of hand-held devices is extended to other business applications. This is not only because such activity will mean that more employees require hand-held devices, but because there is more effort required to enable the applications for remote access. Accessing email is fairly straightforward. Most firms use one of a few popular servers, interfaces are fairly standard and email is accessed in much the same way by employees from different organisations.

However, other business applications are diverse, and the degree to which they are mobile-enabled by their original vendor varies. Even those that are still need a fair amount of tinkering to make them work in the way an individual customer requires – a substantial services opportunity for resellers with the know-how.

Almost 60 per cent of businesses recognised a forthcoming need to enable applications other than email for remote access. This includes such diverse requirements as access to customer data for sales staff; access to inventory data for field engineers; filing vehicle inspection reports in the transport industry; and access to patient records in hospitals. For some this will involve accessing widely used packages from vendors such as Oracle and SAP, but most will also need to integrate more specialist packaged and bespoke applications developed in-house. Mobile enablement of many of these will need to start from scratch.

This extension of the use of hand-held devices to more employees and applications will require businesses to increasingly control the types of devices they deploy; economies of scale will be far more important than they have been to date.

No longer the domain of executives equipped with the latest BlackBerry, the devices required will be cheaper. The market will adapt to supply them. Research In Motion, the vendor of the BlackBerry, is likely to remain a player for the foreseeable future but there is a strong challenge from commodity smartphones and devices that use Microsoft Windows Mobile.

A little more than 15 per cent of businesses already have a strategic vision for remote access to business applications, but the majority are still investigating or looking at the odd tactical deployment. If the market is close to a tipping a point, many will not need too much encouragement to make the move and reap the rewards. Resellers who share the vision of the early adopters stand to benefit as the masses follow.