Driven by converged services, the market for mobile cloud applications is expected to hit US$9.5 billion in revenues by 2014, new research from Juniper suggests.
Fuelled by the need for converged, collaborative services, the widespread adoption of mobile broadband services and the deployment of key technological enablers such as HTML5 and the Open Mobile Alliance’s Smart Card Web Server (SCWS) will drive the market for mobile cloud services.
Findings from the Juniper Research report
The Juniper Research report found that enterprise applications will account for the majority of revenues over the next five years, with businesses increasingly seeking to capitalise on the ability of Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers to offer scalable, flexible data storage solutions allied to device agnostic, synchronised office services.
However, consumer-oriented apps will comprise an ever-larger proportion of total revenues, derived both from time-based subscriptions to services such as mobile online gaming and advertising from cloud-based social networks.
However, the report warned that many enterprise customers still remained wary of entrusting their personal data to remote third parties, and that recent high-profile data losses amongst corporate mobile users in the USA would only exacerbate these concerns.
“Not only is it imperative for cloud providers to ensure that access to and storage of customer data is secure, but that the procedures that they put in place in this regard – including data backup strategies – are transparent to the customer,” the report’s author Dr Windsor Holden, said.
While the onset of a cloud-based ecosystem may further erode the strength of the mobile operator/customer relationship, cloud offers operators the opportunity to develop new revenues streams as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and PaaS providers.
Lack of network capacity may continue to be a constraint on the growth of network-based services even after LTE and WiMAX networks are deployed.
By John Kennedy
Photo: Cloud offers operators the opportunity to develop new revenues streams as Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service providers
