?The enterprise mobility market is rapidly evolving with several market and technology trends impacting product development and vendor strategies. Frost & Sullivan identified six key trends shaping the evolution of the enterprise mobility market. During the following weeks, we will identify these different trends in a series of blog entries in Toshiba’s blog site. Both businesses and vendors should carefully evaluate these trends in order to position themselves more competitively in their respective markets.

Wireless-enabled Enterprises Increase While Various Forms of Mobile Communications Applications Emerge:
WLAN adoption in the enterprise space is growing at a double-digit rate year-over-year. 802.11n is becoming the defacto WLAN standard and is gaining rapid penetration in enterprises, colleges, hospitals, universities, and retail stores across different regions of the world. Improved standards and vendor innovation have made WLANs considerably more reliable, secure and with better overall performance. Today the WLAN market is worth billions of dollars, with different WLAN vendors posting record quarterly revenues.

Finally, we are witnessing various forms of mobile communications applications emerge. The rise of market and technology trends such as consumerization, collaboration, social networking, and unified communications is creating a flood of new communication-related mobile applications. These include team and workspaces, instant messaging apps, email integration, activity streams, content management integration, and social media apps. All this has created a new reality: choices today are so many and diverse that it is very difficult for an enterprise customer to distinguish what solution best fits its needs.

While we believe that the trends that we have identified in these different blog entries are certainly reshaping the mobile landscape, these developments are also causing some chaos within IT departments. Today, almost all enterprises know that they need to implement an enterprise mobility solution in order to stay competitive. Likewise, almost all enterprise mobility vendors understand that they need to continuously add value to their offerings in order to satisfy customers. Yet, constant changes in market conditions are sometimes causing both businesses and vendors to lose focus of what is really needed and what provides real value versus merely responding to market hype.

To avoid costly mistakes and future-proof their investments, businesses need to carefully evaluate the various available enterprise mobility solutions and deploy the ones that best address their current and future needs. When developing a mobility strategy, keep in mind the following:
1) the business objectives you wish to accomplish as a result of the deployment,
2) your existing infrastructure, and
3) the type of mobile employees that you have, depending on their business role. Addressing these issues will help you choose the best mobility solution for your company.

By Mohamed Alaa Saayed, Senior Industry Analyst and ICT Team Leader, Unified Communications, Information and Communication Technologies, Frost & Sullivan