Voice and conferencing solutions will drive overall growth in mobile collaboration: Frost

While email and messaging continue to dominate the market, voice and conferencing solutions will drive overall growth in the mobile collaboration applications space in Asia Pacific. New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Analysis of Asia-Pacific Enterprise Mobile Collaboration Applications Market, has found that unit shipments of mobility licenses stood at 4.7 million in 2013 and are forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.5% through 2018. 

The Asia-Pacific enterprise mobile collaboration applications market is one of the fastest-growing segments of the unified communications (UC) space in terms of revenue and number of users. Approximately five million users in the region access enterprise email, messaging, voice and conferencing applications on mobile devices. 

"The popularity of the Bring Your Own Device trend in the enterprise environment, along with the rapid penetration of smartphones and tablets, has brought enterprise mobile collaboration into a new stage in Asia-Pacific," said Frost & Sullivan Information and Communication Technologies Research Analyst Shuishan Lu. 

"These mobile collaboration applications are quickly becoming a key component in enterprise UC deployment instead of being merely an add-on to desktop-based systems." 

Although price sensitivity and enterprise network concerns slow down the widespread adoption of advanced software, the market will benefit from declining price trends when the per-user-based licensing schemes kick in, said the research firm. The increasing availability of affordable high-speed mobile data networks will also boost usage among enterprises in Asia-Pacific. 

UC vendors, together with their channel partners, can drive up the sales of user-based licenses by offering bundled mobility features as well as better developed systems with advanced functionality. Multiple applications on a single unified mobile client will become easier for enterprise IT departments to deploy and more convenient for corporate users to access. 

"In the future, the hybrid model consisting of both premise-based solutions and cloud services will become more popular," stated Lu. "More enterprises are looking to move certain UC solutions such as mobile messaging and conferencing into the cloud platform while keeping premise-based email applications for security and compliance reasons."