Smartphone take up disappoints

A greater than ever choice of email-capable mobile devices, as well as services and tariffs, should have led to growing take up among business users. But, according to figures from handset maker Nokia, just two per cent of business email users access their mail from a mobile phone or wireless PDA.

Nokia had predicted that by now, businesses would have moved from an opportunistic approach to mobile working - largely driven by small projects or employees setting up their own mobile devices - to what the company terms "strategic mobility". Here, IT departments have a central role in selecting and deploying both services and devices.

Instead, the much of the growth of smart phone use, as well as of applications such as mobile email, is being driven largely by the consumerisation of the technology, and employees bringing personal devices into the workplace and using them to access business data as well as for their own purposes.

"It's fair to say that the enterprise mobility market or the business mobility market is still pretty much in its infancy and has still to achieve the potential that we know is out there," says Mary McDowell, executive vice president at Nokia's enterprise division. "But unlike other IT investments this is user driven. Users don't care what networking gear or storage systems a company uses, but they care a lot about their mobility systems."

Nokia estimates that, of the 700 million business email boxes in use worldwide, just 1.7 per cent are connected to a mobile device. Independent figures from analysts support this: IDC calculates that there are 12 million smartphone users worldwide who connect to a business email device.

But it is not the availability of the technology, or the need, that is the barrier. IDC's figures show that in addition to the 12 million smartphone users who do access email from their handset, there are a further 37 million business smartphone users who only use their phones for calls and text messaging. An even greater number of workers have no device at all: IDC estimates the total number of mobile workers at 373 million.

Such figures could well underestimate the total number of users for mobile business applications.

According to Orange, the mobile operator, some 1.5 million UK employees use mobile email across all the different platforms, including BlackBerry, Microsoft, and operator-branded services. But the number of mobile email users is still less than one tenth of those using fixed email accounts for their work.

There is little doubt, though, that the market has potential for significant further growth: even simply connecting all smartphone users to their companies' email infrastructure would triple the number of mobile mailboxes. Then there is the potential for small businesses and "prosumers" to access mail on the move.

"It is in this market, where consumers, prosumers and small businesses wish ease of access to their ISP (internet service provider) account whilst mobile, that major growth can be expected," says Michael Reilly, head of data products at Orange UK.

So far, though, neither the mobile device manufacturers nor the network operators have been able to convince businesses that mobile email financially viable as a tool for the vast majority of employees. In France, for example, Orange says that 70 per cent of its business customers subscribing to a data bundle access their business email accounts. But the total number of such users totals just 140,000, with a further 100,000 people using BlackBerry handheld's on Orange's French network.

Among many business users, mobile email has almost become synonymous with high-flying executives, such has been the success of Research in Motion's BlackBerry in appealing to senior managers, as well as to highly paid professionals in fields such as the law and banking.

However, even though RIM has produced some impressive case studies to show that investing in BlackBerry produces a dramatic return on investment, it is proving much harder to demonstrate a business case for deploying mobile email throughout the ranks, both on BlackBerry and on competing platforms.

Research by Nokia found that the most common barriers to widespread use of mobile email included cost, especially the cost of data plans charged by the cellular networks, complexity, and the difficulty of justifying the investment in business terms. Security, and the perception that the technology is unstable or unreliable are also factors.

"For email, it is very hard to put the return on mobile email down on a spreadsheet," acknowledges Nokia's McDowell. "That is pretty difficult to quantify. What does get qualified is mobile unified communications, with the integration of email and instant messaging."

To this end, Nokia and other manufacturers have been working closely with office phone system manufacturers and Internet telephony providers to enable the mobile phone to act the main device for fixed and mobile voice calls, as well as an instant messaging and email client. For large companies in particular, providing PBX or office phone system functions out to mobile users can bring real productivity benefits, and Internet telephony can bring measurable savings in calling costs.

Businesses are also looking again at the case for giving data-enabled PDAs to blue collar and technical workers.

The improved email functionality in Microsoft's Exchange Server, along with the relative ease of deploying business applications to the Windows Mobile platform is encouraging more companies to look at specialist vertical applications for their mobile staff, including field service, engineering and customer relationship management. Other platforms, including Symbian and BlackBerry, are also boosting their business applications capabilities.

"CRM and business intelligence are the applications we are seeing most demand for in the mobile space," says Richard Hall, chief technology officer for the UK operations of Avanade, the systems integrator.

"Smart phones really were just advanced pagers. They had never really taken hold outside the executive suite but now people want an application platform that can run the same business logic [as their main applications]. That is very powerful." But, as Hall points out, operators still need to address costs - and device manufacturers need to do more to eliminate complexity.

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