ORLANDO, Fla. and NEW YORK, March 26, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- CTIA WIRELESS 2007 -- The Enterprise Mobility (EMobility) industry is on the cusp of a fundamental shift that will lower barriers to market entry, drive growth and require innovation to retain and grow market share, reveals a PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP report released today. The report, "How to realize the full potential of enterprise mobility," is being issued at the CTIA WIRELESS 2007 convention at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla.
"The status quo will change significantly by 2009," said Christopher Isaac, principal with PricewaterhouseCoopers. "As the industry evolves, there is a limited window of opportunity for market participants to reposition themselves. In order to maximize this opportunity, EMobility participants need to move quickly and open their business models to alliances and innovation. The most successful EMobility businesses will have an open, agile model that encourages innovation via alliances and partnerships and also demonstrates a willingness to cede short-term control for the sake of long-term growth."
PwC defines enterprise mobility, or EMobility, as the operating environment in which business users can interact with customers, employees, assets, products, and other businesses in real time, any time, from any location. PwC estimates that by 2009 the annual value of the EMobility market will surpass $100 billion in the U.S. alone, and after 2009, the market may experience a more intense boom as standardized applications become widely available over high-speed networks.
Currently, because of interoperability issues and industry-specific requirements, large enterprises rely heavily on system integrators for complex projects. But, according to PwC, in the next three years, a handful of EMobility platforms will likely solidify their positions, creating more manageable options for enterprises. Integrated EMobility platforms, high-speed data access, and the move toward mobility software as a service are expected to have the broadest effect on the market's evolution.
The lack of client hardware-software harmonization is both the primary inhibitor and rationale for an EMobility platform, which would offer the enterprise a reliable, end-to-end solution. PwC reports that in the next three years, vendors will jockey for position to provide an integrated platform for mobility applications that blend the capabilities of a server and a client operating system with overall system interoperability and security. Suppliers will be compelled to sell to each other, integrate and become service providers or ally with those who are. Enterprises used to facing a "buy or build" decision will find it unnecessary to build as much and desirable to pay closer attention to vendor capabilities.
Large-scale industry cooperation and collaboration will be essential to the success of EMobility. Those who grasp the innovations occurring on the outside will be best able to take advantage. Historical models based on closed systems will not be able to innovate rapidly enough to keep pace.
Carriers face difficult choices among a number of technologies that are competing to become industry standards. In order to stay competitive, they must support the multiple combinations of devices, operating systems, and applications without losing the opportunity to generate the economies of scale that drive profitability. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, to do this carriers must encourage interoperability, look for partnering opportunities outside the usual circles, be open to nontraditional roles, maintain focus on infrastructure improvements, and continue to adjust, produce and service pricing to encourage the adoption of EMobility offerings.
Rapid growth in EMobility software-as-a-service presents new, previously untapped opportunities. Those who prove themselves most able to help enterprises secure, manage, simplify and accelerate multi-vendor software as a service (SaaS) deployment in the mobile environment could benefit most.
Scenario analysis was an essential part of the analysis of the potential of EMobility because the evolutionary path of the EMobility ecosystem is unpredictable. PricewaterhouseCoopers used the dynamics of innovation and control to build four scenarios of likely potential market developments from 2007 through 2010 and to explore the strategic implications of each scenario. Based on these scenarios and implications, PricewaterhouseCoopers recommends specific actions each market player should take to adapt successfully to the evolving EMobility ecosystem.
Critical actions for the industry include:
* The enterprise customer: Take control of business transformation
-- Depending more heavily on vendors will require enterprises to
gain a deeper understanding of and to exert more influence in the
EMobility market. Enterprises must understand the ecosystem,
develop a stable EMobility vision and anticipate technological
developments outside the current mobile environment. They also
should seek out vendors that provide high levels of technology
integration out of the box, structure EMobility contracts with
careful consideration of the implications to other players, use
budget discipline and negotiating leverage to lower costs, seek
transparency in the supply chain for EMobility and initiate
programs to ensure that the uniqueness of mobility is considered
and the risks associated with it are managed. Lastly, enterprises
must refuse to accept solutions from suppliers that do not offer
high levels of scalability, manageability and interoperability,
and establish a core EMobility infrastructure that supports
experimentation and innovation.
* EMobility suppliers: Cultivate a portfolio of alliances -- All
suppliers need a clearly articulated EMobility strategy. This
strategy should include an open and transparent business model
that requires a different way of doing business. Cultivating a
portfolio of alliances will require suppliers to monitor the
performance of partners and to regularly review their existing
portfolio and potential new partners among the competitors in
order to adjust for changing ecosystem dynamics.
* Infrastructure and device manufacturers: Manage risk through
collaboration -- An open business model, facilitated by EMobility
platforms, will help infrastructure and device manufacturers
manage significant risks. They need to focus investment on higher
levels of standardization, anticipate disruptions from outside
the conventional mobile environment and more entrants from the
world of the fixed Internet, and leverage relationships with
enterprise IT departments and collaboration with software vendors
to sell end-to-end EMobility integration directly to enterprises.
* Software providers: Collaborate to exploit horizontal
opportunities -- Common EMobility platforms and SaaS will create
risks and opportunities for EMobility software developers as both
their markets and competition widen. To address changes in their
financial, delivery, and architecture models,
PricewaterhouseCoopers recommends software providers work more
closely with other providers in the ecosystem to resolve
interoperability standards and set new standards, develop
applications that manage intermittent connectivity and attack
horizontal markets, develop applications that enhance enterprise
business processes in new ways, evaluate the possibility of
disintermediation of mobile enterprise application pure plays by
entrants from the fixed Internet, and monitor the overall
software market for developments that will speed the advent of
utility computing, service-oriented architecture, and pay-per-use
models.
* System integrators and business consultants: Focus on business
processes -- End-to-end solutions, EMobility platforms, SaaS, and
a significant reduction in interoperability issues will
significantly impact the types of implementations that require
system integrators and business consultants. To develop the
strategic agility necessary to respond to these changes, they
must ensure that the need to change a business process drives the
implementation, anticipate the need for increased integration and
simplification of many promising emerging technologies, emphasize
the generalized carrier integration and specialized enterprise
integration capabilities, extend the fixed capabilities into
mobile environments by managing intermittent connectivity, and
monitor developments closely for improvements in off-the-shelf
products and services and plan for business model shifts to
accommodate these improvements.
The report is the culmination of study and analysis of the enterprise mobility market on a global basis. PricewaterhouseCoopers consulted financial and industry analysts and interviewed executives specializing in enterprise mobility. In order to estimate the size of the U.S. EMobility market, PricewaterhouseCoopers reviewed numerous third-party IT research sources.
For an electronic copy of the complete PricewaterhouseCoopers report, "How to realize the full potential of enterprise mobility," visit the "publications" section at http://www.pwc.com/emobility. Other convergence-related reports produced by PricewaterhouseCoopers, including, "How to capitalize on Lifestyle Advertising in a Customer-centric World," "Breaking down walls: How an open business model is now the convergence imperative," and "The Rise of Lifestyle Media: Achieving Success in the Digital Convergence Era," are also available.
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