Across Asia Pacific (AP), expanding mobility support for employees, customers, and/or business partners will be the top strategic telecom priority for enterprises in 2013, surpassing other telecom priorities like performing network management and consolidating operations equipment, rationalizing/consolidating telecom/communications service providers, and moving communications applications to the cloud.

While enterprises will invest in a range of mobility products and services, there are five key areas in particular which will attract the most investment in 2013. Vendors need to focus on the solutions and engagement models that meet customers’ needs in these five areas and target the industries and countries where the demand will be greatest:

  • Business consulting services. Specifically for defining a formal enterprise mobility and/or BYOD program strategy, including devices, applications, data access, and provisioning. Moreover, AP organizations will likely need help in drafting compliance and legal policies related to enterprise mobility.
  • Telecom expense management solutions. This is one of the most critical telecom requirements for AP CIOs in 2013. Across the region, 50% to 60% of organizations pay the entire cost of voice and data services for company-supported Android and iOS phones and tablets. For BlackBerry phones, this proportion is nearly 70%.
  • Mobile device management solutions. To secure data through centralized management of devices and apps. Additional solutions likely to be considered include data leak prevention, controlling mobile device access to corporate email through Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync and two-factor authentication.
  • Packaged applications for mobile collaboration. To facilitate “anytime, anywhere” collaboration, enterprises require both typical collaboration applications like Microsoft SharePoint/Lync and Cisco WebEx and next-gen enterprise social applications like Yammer and Chatter.
  • Corporate app stores. Investments in app stores will increase in 2013 as organizations seek to simplify application provisioning, management, and updates. In terms of design and structure, organizations require advanced sort functionalities so that they can categorize all apps by role and function in addition to basic categories like application type, most-downloaded app, and top-rated app. Some forward-looking enterprises are also planning to build an “intelligent” recommendation engine into the store to improve application discoverability.

My latest research report, The Enterprise Mobility Outlook For Asia Pacific In 2013, covers these five key investment areas in more detail and maps the likely procurement/deployment preferences of SMBs and large enterprises to each key area. This level of insight is necessary for enterprise mobility vendors to customize their solutions to suit the needs of their customers.

What do you think? I’d love to hear from both vendors and organizations embarking on their own enterprise mobility strategy.