Just 51% of Australian and New Zealand organisations have the right skills in-house to develop and support their mobile enterprise strategy, according to research by open source software giant, Red Hat.

In fact, Red Hat says its research reveals that companies in the two countries are struggling to implement enterprise mobile strategies, due to the major IT skills gap in their local markets.

According to the 2016 Red Hat ANZ Enterprise Mobile Index, skills are a major barrier to implementation for many businesses, with 63% of respondents having fewer than 10 mobile applications in the organisation. An additional 23% had between 10 and 20 mobile applications.

Colin McCabe, director consulting and training at Red Hat, warns that local companies failing to get the right skills on board risk falling behind in the race to mobility.

“These statistics suggest that the region is experiencing a skills shortage in the areas of mobile integration and application development. Clearly, most companies sit in the development stages of the mobile maturity curve, which means there is plenty of room for growth. As such, we’d expect to see a substantial increase in mobility spending over the next few years.”

According to McCabe, while many organisations can overcome the skills shortage barrier by outsourcing, mobile is becoming increasingly central to many companies’ IT strategy, “so it is more likely they will look to hire the skills they need”.

“Outsourcing is a stop-gap measure in the case of mobility. Unlike a specialist piece of software or capability, mobility permeates all aspects of an organisation’s IT environment, so it’s important to have those skills in-house.

“Organisations can look to hire people with the right skillsets, or they can train current staff to close the gap, using emerging technologies.”

McCabe also said that organisations need to be able to develop and deploy mobile apps in an agile and flexible manner, and a successful enterprise mobile strategy is based on a strong platform architecture, developer experience, technology integration, and the ability to collaborate to build a fast IT organisation.

“Companies in the local market that fail to get the right skills on board risk falling behind in the race to mobility. This has ramifications in terms of attracting and retaining both customers and high-performing employees, since people now expect to be able to interact with organisations via mobile devices," McCabe warned.