Mobile Business Report

The key message for enterprises should be that bandwidth should not be a limiting factor to mobile deployments. Although bandwidths are currently low, enterprises can implement a whole series of solutions that do not necessitate continuous wireless connectivity. For example, it may not be necessary for enterprises supporting field service engineers to send through past service history in real-time, or for engineers to send back data immediately upon completion of a call. Both can be handled through hot-synching until the enterprise decides it wants to operate this process in real-time as wireless networks improve.

Constituents of the mobile solution

In order to provide mobile access to their data, enterprises have to make a number of technology decisions based on the constituent parts of the mobile solution. Figure 2 illustrates a high-level overview of the mobile enterprise stack, highlighting the core areas that enterprises must address. Amongst others, vendors, service providers and integrators must advise enterprises on mobile hardware (including devices), middleware and software as well as addressing increasingly important choices such as mobile security and wireless network type.

Market growth predicted in 2003

Datamonitor believes that the mobile enterprise solutions market will remain relatively stagnant for the next twelve months in the core markets of North America and Western Europe. The macroeconomic situation, a continued focus on eBusiness solutions and a general 'wait and see' attitude are certainly set to impact the spending on mobile solutions among enterprises in the coming months. Although there is a strong interest in the potential of mobile solutions, it will take time for enterprises to go through the cycle of interest, to trials and then full-scale deployments. Indeed, mobile applications have become renowned for the length of their trial periods in comparison to other IT applications.