70 percent technology stakeholders says that unified communications is a key driver for enterprise mobility, said a Citrix India survey. The second driver is increasing collaboration among employees.
97 percent has deployed corporate email through enterprise mobility solutions, according to Citrix Enterprise Mobility survey that was conducted by Zinnov with 130 IT and business stakeholders in 65 organizations across India.
Enterprise applications such as CRM (planned by 38 percent organizations), ERP (40 percent), SCM (31 percent), Sales Force Automation (25 percent) as well as Time Management / Billing & Field Service / Order Booking applications (25 percent) are expected to witness mobilization.
Top three benefits they accrued through enterprise mobility included improved productivity, enhanced competitiveness and ensuring better customer service.
For organizations to have a comprehensive strategy on mobility, respondents identified the following key pillars:
User devices
Android (84 percent respondents), iOS (62 percent respondents) and Windows Phone (46 percent respondents) are gaining popularity requiring organizations to support multiple platforms for enterprise mobility applications.
Applications
After email (96 percent respondents), CRM (68 percent respondents) and Unified Communications (64 percent respondents) form the key applications desired by business stakeholders.
Data accessibility
Desktop & App Virtualization, and Cloud based data storage solutions can help organizations ensure seamless access to data, which becomes essential for a highly mobile workforce.
Users
Employees prefer user friendliness of apps, easy authorization, less device downtime and support for both work and personal devices.
The survey revealed that Indian companies recognize the compelling need for enterprise mobility adoption due to factors such as IT consumerisation and increased mobile device proliferation. However, the potential is marred by inhibitors such as security & data breach, integration issues, regulatory compliance, high cost etc.
Sanjay Deshmukh, area vice president, India Sub-continent, Citrix said, “Increasingly, users across Indian organizations are demanding freedom to choose their own device, use any app at work, and have access to enterprise data from any place, any device, anytime. As a result, organizations need to redefine their mobility strategy to address user demand while meeting IT security and management requirements around the user, device, apps and data.”
Frost & Sullivan on Unified communication
The growing mobile and remote workforce is pushing enterprises across Asia-Pacific to adopt comprehensive mobile collaboration services. Unified communication (UC) vendors and cloud service providers with mature hosted/cloud infrastructure are offering solutions based on different subscription models to cater to varying end-user needs.
While basic mobile collaboration service packages – with email, calendar, contact and IM/presence – have commanded the most attention thus far, advanced cloud-based enterprise mobile collaboration services including mobile voice and conferencing will dominate the market in the future.
New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Analysis of the Enterprise Mobile Collaboration Services Market in Asia-Pacific, CY2013, finds that the total number of active users is estimated to be US$1.12 million in 2013 and forecasted to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 21.4 percent through 2018. The study covers mobile email, voice, messaging, and conferencing solutions of which mobile voice, messaging, and conferencing represent key growth areas.
Currently, the adoption of mobile collaboration services hosted in public/hybrid cloud environments is low among the price-sensitive, large enterprises in Asia-Pacific that already have premises-based ICT infrastructure.
“However, cloud-based enterprise mobile collaboration services will soon gain traction due to the improved security and lower upfront investment requirement,” said Frost & Sullivan Information & Communication Technologies Industry Manager Jessie Yu.
