While the enterprise mobility market in Australia grew by just .63 percent last year and the hardware market is flat, significant growth is being forecast by IDC Australia for mobility software and services, with mobile apps providing the low-hanging fruit for the juicier mobile security and mobility management software and services markets.
IDC Australia’s 2016 analysis perspective report for the Australian Enterprise Mobility market found that the services component — the single largest contributor to the market — will contribute close to half of enterprise mobility spending by 2020 while the hardware market will continue to shrink until 2020 as a result of saturation in the business laptop and smartphone market.
On the hardware front, the report revealed that organisations are shifting away from a defensive attitude to a proactive approach regarding their employees’ use of mobile technologies and that they expect hardware to be in the hands of employees.
The report discovered that security concerns continue to outweigh the advantages of mobility for the majority of Australian organisations. This may be a reason that, although Australia is seen as one of the most progressive markets for enterprise mobility in the APJ region, it slipped to fifth place in enterprise mobility maturity in 2016.
As the market matures, Australian organisations are becoming more concerned with mobile applications, their procurement, development, and management. Future concerns are expected to focus increasingly on the role of mobility in overall business strategy and a holistic approach to IT systems mobility.
“The big picture is critical as enterprise mobile strategy needs to tie to other third platform pillars, especially cloud and analytics, with the Internet of Things effectively extending the business value of enterprise mobility, as well as opening opportunities for enabling vendors to service this space,” said Sabharinath Bala, senior research manager.
