Indian Firms Bet Big on Enterprise Mobility Solutions: Study

Indian enterprises are making policies around trends like mobility and bring your own device (BYOD) and earmarking budgets of as much as Rs 10 crore, as they look to boost employee productivity and growth, a survey by handset maker BlackBerry and CMR said today.

According to the survey --India Enterprise Mobility --, mobility is a top priority for most organisations with 71 per cent saying they either have a mobility policy or are at present in the process of drafting one.

Also, data security (76 per cent) and control of devices (62 per cent) emerged as the key requirements for implementing mobility solutions.

The survey, covering 407 IT heads across various industries, was conducted to map the requirements and opportunities in Indian enterprise mobility market.

About 66 per cent respondents said mobility solutions helped firms in real-time data collection and reporting from mobile workers, while 56 per cent said it helped in reducing paper work, administration time and expenses.

"For the next 12 months, 49 per cent respondents said their mobility budget would be less than Rs 50 lakh, while 41 per cent said it would be between Rs 51 lakh - Rs one crore.

About eight said it would be between Rs 1-10 crore and two per cent said it would be Rs 10 crore and above," it said.

Mobility budget seems to be higher in case of education, manufacturing, IT/ITeS and retail, it added.

The top three investment areas for enterprise mobility include business consulting services, telecom expense management solutions and mobile device management solution.

"The era of mobile enterprise has arrived. An entire ecosystem needs to be developed to support enterprise mobility. Design, development, deployment and maintenance of devices and applications will assume critical importance in this process," CMR lead analyst (Emerging Technologies) Apalak Ghosh said.

The survey also found that smartphone has got equally high penetration across all verticals with Android as the dominant platform on the network of various companies, followed by BlackBerry and iOS (Apple).

Also, tablet has got highest penetration in telecom, media and entertainment, followed by education and IT/ITeS verticals.

BlackBerry is constantly looking at new opportunities and avenues to further strengthen our enterprise offerings and address the growing complexities and risks of mobile communication, BlackBerry India managing director Sunil Lalvani said.

"We believe this report will highlight the disruption taking place in communication across enterprises as it offers compelling insights as well as a future roadmap for the industry at large," he added.