Daniel Taylor is the founder and managing director of the Mobile Enterprise Alliance. He says he can see clear evidence that the mobile enterprise market is taking off.

"When we started collecting mobile enterprise case studies two years ago, there weren’t many to find," he says. "The situation is different today: we now see large organizations with thousands of employees investing in mobility and we have about 85 case studies in our archive."

There are 180 million mobile workers in the US and Western Europe, but fewer than 10 percent of those use mobile communication solutions, so there is a lot of market potential. Analyst firm Ovum recently reported that roughly 50 percent of the telecoms budget within enterprises is spent just on mobile phones that are used almost exclusively for voice.

Taylor says many companies invested blindly five years ago. "And many got skeptical. On top of that, services such as mobile e-mail did not make the market take off as much as expected. We are seeing growth today among field-services/field-sales-style solutions for companies that have thousands of employees. These are the kinds of solutions that are really taking off, and that's why we are getting case studies.

"There's a lot of talk about data applications. For enterprises, the thing that's really pushing mobile data and devices is the modernization of paper-based processes: replacing the clipboard with a computer. It's about giving computing resources to people that do not have desktop computers."

This group of employees includes government workers, tax inspectors, engineers maintaining local water systems, field service personnel working for telephone operators or electric utility companies, delivery drivers and sales representatives that may spend whole days visiting clients. These are truly mobile workers who spend most of their time out of the office, Taylor says.

He says one big challenge is managing the cost. "If you look at the average enterprise, especially in Western Europe, it might have 5 or 10 different wireless operators to deal with. This is the reason behind roaming alliances, of course. But being able to manage mobile-phone expenditure is a tremendous challenge for some enterprises. I know companies and IT managers whose job it is to manage that, and they find themselves hiring people just to get that expenditure under control."

Taylor says enterprises also need to be better at identifying and understanding mobility requirements across their organizations. "It is easy to say 'we need to do something mobile,' but does it mean a solution delivered to top management, or to manufacturing, or is it a logistics environment? That question is a challenge for many enterprises today: who are their mobile workers, where are they located and what are their groupings?"

He says the type of solution is not always determined by the size of the enterprise. "I have seen some very large companies that have had small sales teams of, say, 50 representatives. The sales management wants a mobile solution so it spearheads an activity for getting mobile technology in place and developing a mobile application that fits these target groups' needs."

The benefits are enormous, Taylor says: "From my experience, sales people are notoriously bad at keeping information up to date in databases. If they have to wait six hours to enter that information, they are less likely to do so and the accuracy suffers. But if they have a system that lets them enter the information immediately after a customer meeting, and even check information about inventory during the meeting, they definitely have a much stronger incentive to use it. It also has a tremendous impact on the relationship with the customer."

He believes that the most successful enterprises over the next two or three years will be those that decide to take full control of their mobility costs.

"The big challenge will be to get better understanding of the options for enterprises in terms of mobile data. The first step is identifying the opportunities to work smarter and more efficiently. In the longer term, more enterprises have to think about developing company-wide mobility policies: who gets what, how these devices are secured, what kind of information is on them and who pays for them. All these components are part of a much larger mobility policy. And I know of many large organizations that have solutions for certain parts of the workforce, but very few with enterprise-wide mobility policies."

Hendrik Bergstén