Still not mobile enough

“ size="4">Birds have
wings, they're free. They can fly where they want when they want.
They have the kind of mobility many people envy” — Roger Tory
Peterson

With the
changing nature of work irrespective of location and time, most
people use technologies for work related solutions. These days
people are expected to be proficient at using such technologies as an
added advantage. It is observed that most organizations have changed
their policies of making employees mandatory to be physically present
and work, and have moved beyond 9-5 job. On the whole, there is an
evolution in the way we used to work-thanks to globalization. This
simply means that people have access to each other throughout on all
points, which means that mobility has impacted the entire work
culture. This directs us to a massive mobility market in India where
presently 840 mn mobile devices are used, and it is supposed to
increase up to 1,440 mn in the next 5 years. Out of this, 15% is the
smartphone penetration in India.

According to
a recent report on Enterprise Mobility Market which has grown
exponentially over the past 3 years-Zinnov Management Consulting
talks about the huge growth of enterprise mobility market which
encompasses hardware, network, data, applications, and associated
services. This is primarily on account of factors like increased
maturity of industry verticals towards adoption, declining costs,
increased start-up activity, and ecosystem play in market
development.

Zinnov also
interviewed 150 key IT decision makers in India to understand the
softer issues driving enterprise mobility. Now they have some
interesting points to make. According to them, the key reasons for
mobility were push from the management, collaboration among
employees, get more work timeout of employees, pull from end-users
(customers or employees) and reducing communication costs. And, the
business drivers for enterprise mobility were better customer
service, productivity advantage, employee satisfaction, and
competitive advantage in that order.

According to
Praveen Bhadada, director, global consulting, Zinnov Management
Consulting, “Enterprise mobility in India certainly has a billion
dollar potential and projects over 40% y-o-y growth for the segment
in the next 5 years. The declining prices of smartphones and tablet
PCs, enterprise mobility market in the country is expected to touch
around $1 bn by 2015.”

The Zinnov
study also found that increased adoption of majority of the mobile
platforms is a key motivation factor for start-ups. As platform
adoptability improves along with network penetration and
connectivity, more business functions like ERP, CRM, SCM, sales force
automation, unified communications and billing too are coming under
the enterprise mobility ambit. This is coupled with maturing
organizations that are trying to mobilize departments like HR,
retail, customer service, finance, and field service.

The above
study makes it quite evident that mobility solutions are important
for SMBs/SMEs and majority of these businesses are aggressively
implementing them in all developing countries, therefore encompassing
great prospects in India but it seems not all solution providers have
explored this segment, which promises huge business opportunity
as well as growth.

Devendra
Taneja of PC Solutions, a solution provider in New Delhi, who is not
into mobility solutions as of now said, “Limited market size as of
now is hindering us not to explore mobility solution market. We are
hoping to enter this segment as we are building our competencies
offering solutions on opportunities emerging in Android, iOS and
Wintel environments.”

While
sharing
his views on the scenario of providing mobility solutions, Taneja
said, “At present in corporate environment, a large portion of
mobility solutions deployed has been extending in-house application
hosted in captive data centers to portable devices. In such a
situation, primary role has been of software development/deploying
partners. However, with more and more public cloud-based applications
getting acceptance by SMB segment, 2 things are expected to happen.
First, explosion in opportunities to integrate with all kind of
mobility devices (laptops, iPads, mobile phones). Second, massive
market expansion, which means that there would be plenty of scope for
deploying and configuring solutions that can be taken up by
infrastructure solution providers as well.”

K Subramanya
of Central Data Systems, a solution provider from Bengaluru said, “We
do not focus much on mobility market but we provide 2 kinds of
mobility solutions. First, the indoor Wi-Fi solution for corporate
and second, Unified Communication with mobility features for
end-users.” While Ajish George of System Tech said, “We have not
explored the market as of now. We cater to niche market but in future
we would further look into it.”

At this
point
of time, many more solution providers were not looking keenly into
mobility solutions. Well it's not that SPs have completely ignored
this field as there are solution providers which are very much into
mobility solutions. Suresh Ramani of Tech Gyan, an SP from Mumbai
shared a lot of things about the offerings in mobility solutions,
“Till some time back, the meaning of mobility was getting emails on
phone, but now, the belief is changing specially after cloud
computing came into picture, one can access the data from anywhere.
Another aspect we are talking about is that cloud-based unified
communications coming into picture eg, Microsoft has got a solution
called Lync. Now, there is a cloud-based offering on Lync, with which
one can have one-to-one chat, video from anywhere in the world. That
really adds new dimension to the mobility part. Then we have
something like web conferencing and live meeting, adding another
dimension.”

He further
added, at the high end, we have companies like Wipro offering unified
communications to top customers, then for SMBs, it's solution
providers like us. Previously high-end mobility solutions were only
for top corporates but with cloud emerging, the whole thing has
become very much affordable now. I am quite gung-ho about the
prospects.”

Later
commenting on the type of support and integration one have for
smartphones, iPads and tablets, Ramani said, “For smartphones, one
level is at major vendors like Microsoft who provide Activesync on
all major devices so that user experience is enhanced across devices.
At another level, we have other application providers who need to
ensure that their applications support mobile device. We are able to
give users a great experience of MS Exchange on iPads due to
Activesync on iPads. But not much is available on iPad in terms of
business apps. In fact in India, the single most popular application
on iPad is 'Angry Birds'. Using Citrix and Microsoft
Technologies, it's possible to do client virtualization and do more
serious stuff on iPad.”

The revenue
generated is also good. Ramani said, “Around 30% of the revenue comes
from solutions involving mobility. This may be a combination of
products and services.”

WHY
SHOULD
SPs TAKE THIS OPPORTUNITY SERIOUSLY?

According to
a recent study by Techaisle, a global SMB IT market research and
industry
analyst organization on multi-country primary research study on SMB
mobility
adoption and trends shows that the US SMBs would spend $32 bn on
mobility solutions with 81% of it on actually adopting mobility
solutions in 2011.

The
corresponding Techaisle multi-country channel survey shows that VARs
have been more active in offering mobility solutions as compared to
other channel partners. Forty-four percent of SMB channel partners
either currently offer or plan to offer mobility solutions, which is
1 channel partner for every 140 SMBs. The same study was conducted in
the UK, Germany, and Italy where SMBs are likely to spend $28 bn on
mobility solutions in 2011. Overall, 82% of SMBs are either currently
implementing or planning to implement some type of mobility solutions
ranging from simple mobile device based applications to sophisticated
logistics solutions. Here it was also observed that the VARs have
been more active in offering mobility solutions as compared to other
channel partners. Thirty-eight percent of SMB channel partners either
currently offer or plan to offer mobility solutions, which is 1
channel partner for every 210 SMBs.

The whole
idea tends to one specific thing that Germany having around 1.2% of
the world's total population while the UK and Italy contributes
around 0.9% to the total population and the US having around 4.5 % of
total population, seems to have greater penetration of these
solutions when compared to India, which contributes around 17.7% of
the world's total population and has largest number of SMBs across
the world. Still the mobility solutions to these SMBs remain at a
nascent stage in India.

This means
that there is much more market to be tapped, much more domains to be
explored in India. With the
massive shift of SMBs from PCs for emails to smartphones and tablets,
the SMBs are
willing to implement these kind of solutions around mobility. With
reduced hardware costs, SMBs may enhance the kind of investments on
mobility solutions as the operating cost is definitely going to come
down.

PROMINENT
BENEFITS

Talking about
the challenges observed in mobility, Ramani said, “The internet
bandwidth
becomes a major problem as beyond email, one needs a decent bandwidth
and in India this seems to be a problem.” In the near future,
internet connectivity issues also seem to be good as substantiated by
Zinnov. It is said that network and connectivity will increase
drastically in India as there would be 9 times increase in IP traffic
to reach 1.2 exabyte per month in 2015. There will be 1 bn networked
devices in 2015, up from 570 mn in 2010. In addition, 28% of India's
total IP traffic will be through mobile in 2015, up from 2.2% today
and 7% of broadband connections will be faster than 5 Mbps in 2015,
up from 4% today. And the growth in average mobile connection speed
will increase 56 times, reaching 1,037 kbps in 2015.

CHALLENGES
AHEAD

For all the
above reasons, India seems to be poised in mobility market in near
future and so does the opportunity for solution providers but amidst
all market grabbing opportunity in mobility, SPs should also look at
the challenges the enterprises faces in implementing mobility
solutions. At first, the penetration of mobile devices is restricted
to senior level employees owing to low-average salary of the
mid-level or low-level employees.

To overcome
this challenge, from hardware vendors to ISVs to solutions providers,
all have to work in sync. Second, lack of knowledge in implementing
these solutions, vendors and partners should come together to educate
the community. Business centric mobile applications should be built
in order to have more adoption. Besides, creating a strong and secure
architecture would act as an additional cost upon enterprises.

Further,
needing more assistance from vendors, Ramani said, “The solution
providers can only do the job of integration and training. Vendors
need to ensure that their systems should be in sync with the
equipment of other vendors in order to get a seamless experience.
More often than not, this does not happen. The vendors also need to
provide adequate training to their partners.”

In spite of
everything, gains are plentiful if partners decide to indulge
themselves in a full-fledged way into this segment. Overall cost
reduction would be the USP that SPs can work upon. From TCS to
Infosys, all major vendors too are focusing on mobility solutions for
large enterprise; definitely SPs would have a great market ahead
providing solutions for SMEs.