A new report from Juniper Research titled “Mobile Cloud: Smart Device Strategies for Enterprise & Consumer Markets 2011-2016” suggests that annual revenues derived from mobile cloud-based enterprise services are expected to reach $39 billion by 2016. The reason for this growth is found in mobile network operators’ strategy to offer corporate clients an array of “unified communications suites.”
Unsurprisingly, we’re not necessarily talking about the new money. Rather a significant proportion of these revenues will represent a migration of enterprise spend from traditional siloed offerings. However, cloud-based services can help carriers in their customer retention plans, through the provision of hosting allied to solutions such as messaging, presence, managed email, collaboration, conferencing and IP telephony. What’s more, the cloud offers operators the opportunity to develop double-sided revenues by opening their APIs to SaaS providers and thus share in revenues derived from their services.
On the other side, not everyone likes cloud-based services. For one thing, potential customers have security concerns and want to see a demonstrable ROI (return on investment) of such services. Data outages especially have the potential to impact severely on cloud-based services unless data redundancy is improved. Moreover, enterprises need/want to be aware of the physical location of the servers storing their data…