How Mobile Is Changing Enterprise IT

Business Insider Mobile Insights recently took a look at the ways mobile is changing Enterprise IT and there were some valuable insights that I wanted to share with you.

The recent Gartner Symposium / ITxpo made some interesting predictions regarding the future of mobile:

In 2016, more than 1.6 billion smart mobile devices will be purchased globally. Two-thirds of the mobile workforce will own a smartphone, and 40% of the workforce will be mobile.

In 2016, half of all non-PC devices will be purchased by employees. By the end of the decade, half of all devices in business will be purchased by employees.

The emergence of Apple iPads, which for most users are difficult to justify as an essential computing tool, has made BYOD a near-term priority.

Shipments of Android tablets will exceed shipments of iOS tablets by year end 2014 while Windows 8 will remain relatively niche and more attractive to organizations.

HTML5 will be a key mobile technology, but fragmentation and immaturity will remain challenges through 2015.

By 2016, 60% of large enterprises will implement limited access network zones to limit the connectivity of personally owned mobile devices.

In the next five years 65% of corporations will adopt MDM (Master Data Management) to address security concerns from smartphones and tablets.

Through 2017, 90% of enterprises will have two or more mobile operating systems to support.

By 2015, 20% of smartphone users worldwide will conduct commerce using context-enriched services on a weekly basis.

They also highlighted that there are some other big shifts worth checking out such as server virtualization, cloud computing, security and overall IT spending trends.

Supporting this, IDC reports that consumers are migrating away from PC-based internet use (dropping from 240 million users in the USA in 2012 to 225 million in 2016 and are using mobile devices more often as their default gateway to the internet with more consumers predicted to be accessing the internet through mobile devices than PC’s by 2015.

Fuelling this will be the prediction that Worldwide business-to-consumer (B2C) m-commerce spending will grow six fold between 2011 and 2016 reaching $223 billion – just in the US market!

Mobile is an important topic and businesses should be assessing their strategies now to effectively plan for the future.