Infotech Lead India: Expanding mobility support will be the top telecom priority for enterprises in 2013 in Asia Pacific (AP), according to Forrester.
Forrester analyst Katyayan Gupta says mobility support to employees, partners and customers will surpass other telecom priorities like performing network management and consolidating operations equipment, rationalizing/consolidating telecom/communications service providers, and moving communications applications to the cloud.
While enterprises will invest in a range of mobility products and services, there are five key areas in particular which will attract the most investment in 2013.
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Vendors need to focus on the solutions and engagement models that meet customers’ needs in these five areas and target the industries and countries where the demand will be greatest:
Business consulting services
Specifically for defining a formal enterprise mobility and/orBYOD program strategy, including devices, applications, data access, and provisioning. Moreover, AP organizations will likely need help in drafting compliance and legal policies related to enterprise mobility.
Telecom expense management solutions.
This is one of the most critical telecom requirements for AP CIOs in 2013. Across the region, 50 percent to 60 percent of organizations pay the entire cost of voice and data services for company-supported Android and iOS phones and tablets. For BlackBerry phones, this proportion is nearly 70 percent.
Mobile device management solutions
To secure data through centralized management of devices and apps. Additional solutions likely to be considered include data leak prevention, controlling mobile device access to corporate email through Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync and two-factor authentication.
Packaged applications for mobile collaboration
To facilitate “anytime, anywhere” collaboration, enterprises require both typical collaboration applications like Microsoft SharePoint/Lync and Cisco WebEx and next-gen enterprise social applications like Yammer and Chatter.
Corporate app stores
Investments in app stores will increase in 2013 as organizations seek to simplify application provisioning, management, and updates. In terms of design and structure, organizations require advanced sort functionalities so that they can categorize all apps by role and function in addition to basic categories like application type, most-downloaded app, and top-rated app. Some forward-looking enterprises are also planning to build an “intelligent” recommendation engine into the store to improve application discoverability.
Forrester analyst Katyayan Gupta
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