By Teresa von Fuchs
Friday, May 25, 2007
According to a recent report, The 451 Group expects the mobile office market to converge within the next 12-24 months, leaving few survivors.
"Other than RIM, most of the vendors currently vying for a piece of the mobile office market have discovered that making direct enterprise sales is tough to pull off," said Tony Rizzo, director of research for The 451 Group's enterprise mobile technology practice, in a statement. "It's gotten to the point where most of them have turned to the wireless carriers to open doors - and most of those doors will be in the consumer space."
Citing reports that estimate the total wireless market to be around 600 million users, The 451 Group estimates the market for enterprise users at roughly 60 million. Of that total, the analyst firm believes the market for smartphones running mobile office applications such as e-mail is closer to 20 million premium-level users.
The report classifies the remaining 540 million non-enterprise users as either prosumers, a group estimated at about 27 million, or pure consumers.
The 451 Group asserts that consumers are not interested in paying for anything more robust than basic access to personal e-mail accounts (Gmail, hotmail or Yahoo). Of the 27 million likely global prosumers, 451 analysts believe that at least 25% of them will turn to either RIM, Microsoft or IBM, leaving approximately 20 million prosumers for the market to squabble over.
"While there is room here for a few third-party vendors, the mobile office market does not look to us to be quite the 600-million-user marketplace that it might seem at first glance," writes Rizzo.