The mobile explosion in the enterprise

The consumer market has adopted text and mobile application use in a big way. Texting is pervasive in Europe and growing rapidly in North America. Nemertes Research benchmarking revealed the following information and projections on mobility: - 12 month growth is projected at over 400% - Mobile services are costing typically $5,000 per enabled user per year. This is a dramatic counter to standard computing services which cost around $10,000 per user per year. - IT influences only about 30% of mobile application adoption. The business is driving adoption. IT may however be stuck with managing the costs of mobile adoption. - Less than 30% of companies are considering deploying mobile-presence integration solutions. - Nearly 50% are interested in dual mode devices. ie. devices that can work acrross carrier and non-carrier networks. such as Wi-Fi networks. The big difference between consumer and enterprise mobile adoption is focused around endpoint manageability. As the number of devices explodes and the variety of applications and supporting data grows, it is critical that an enterprise has the ability to manage all these facets. Manageability is a major hidden cost for mobile applications. Over the air deployment of applications becomes an issue. It struck me that may be Steve Jobs and Apple have got it right. The iPhone supports Web 2.0 applications with Ajax support built in to the phone's browser. As Steve pointed out in his World Wide Developer Conference key note. Deployment is as simple as placing the application on your web server. However, this means that the iPhone needs to be enhanced to support the AIR aka Apollo that will enable off-line applications. I wonder how soon we will see AIR support for the iPhone. That would be a strategically astute move for Apple that could tip the balance against Microsoft Silverlight.