Nokia has tapped enterprises — to gain market share in the enterprise smartphone space — such as Coca-Cola in Vietnam and Cambodia, London’s estate agent Foxtons and United States’ retail and entertainment complex Mall of America.
Enterprise smartphone space is becoming a focus area for Nokia. Ovum says enterprise smartphone shipments are expected to reach 32.9 million in 2012 from 26.8 million in 2011 globally.
Enterprise smartphone market will see significant growth because enterprises are increasingly adopting smartphones to support a range of business applications. The demand for enterprise smartphones is driven by the need to support business applications on mobile devices. CIOs/IT managers are increasingly adopting a more flexible work pattern as they continue to support remote employees.
According Forrester, 53 percent IT organizations in India plan to increase their software spending on mobile applications in 2013.
“It’s encouraging to see Indian CIOs start to give a high priority to mobility software spending, but our research shows that the majority of mobile application initiatives are skewed toward employees and BYOT (and, to some extent, partners) with little focus on mobile customer engagement,” said Manish Bahl, country manager of Forrester India.
Recent research reports are not giving much weightage to Nokia and its Microsoft Windows 8 platform.
According to Nokia — in the case of Coca-Cola deal — its Lumia range of smartphones offer support for Microsoft Office on the Microsoft Windows Phone 8 platform for order processing, equipment validation and market execution improvement.
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In addition, features such as Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Lync and Office365 as well as seamless integration with Outlook — will enable employees to work flexibly and remotely with secure access to all their corporate data and systems.
This means its selection of Microsoft Windows as the OS platform has start paying off well.
London’s estate agent Foxtons has already deployed around 900 Lumia smartphones to its employees. The company has 35 offices throughout London and two in Surrey.
Foxtons switched to Nokia Lumia due to its integration with the company’s existing Microsoft infrastructure. Foxtons uses Microsoft Outlook to ensure that employees are armed with property information for each calendar appointment.
In 2011, Ovum had predicted that BlackBerry will retain its overall lead over the forecast period (2011-2016) as its device management and security capabilities make it a favourite with IT departments. However, Android and iOS devices will make significant gains, reflecting trends in the consumer smartphone market. Ongoing improvements in manageability of these device platforms and support for more business applications will begin to make these devices much more appealing to enterprise buyers.
In November 2012, comScore said that Google Android ranked as the top smartphone platform with a 53.7 percent market share in the U.S. Apple’s market share is 35 percent. RIM ranked third with 7.3 percent share. Microsoft (3 percent) and Symbian (0.5 percent) rounded out the top five.
According to Convergence Catalyst, BlackBerry’s smartphone market share in India fell from around 15 percent in 2011 to less than 8 percent in 2012.
Gartner says Samsung is the leader in both worldwide smartphone and overall mobile phone sales in the December quarter.
According to Gartner, sales of worldwide smartphone sales to end-users will touch 1 billion units in 2013.
Recently, Nokia said it would launch cost effective Lumia smartphones for emerging markets. Hope more enterprises will buy Nokia phones and go mobile.
Anand B
editor@infotechlead.com
