2011 will indeed be a year of more and more enterprises waking up to the idea that mobile can offer them more; not just in terms of reaching customers, but also in terms of operational applications that can help them do far more.

Remarkably, the world of enterprise mobility has remained very two dimensional. Enterprise mobility still tends to mean mobile email or perhaps software that prevents corporate users from making unauthorised calls. Now, however, enterprise mobile users are realising that the communications app they are using to communicate with their friends would actually be useful at work within their project team. This is further driven by the fact that many enterprises are moving towards relaxing policies on mobile devices and, in some cases, relying on employees using their own phones instead of having corporate-issued devices.

In many cases, the successful new enterprise apps – of which we’ll see quite a few in 2011 – might start life as consumer apps and then, after a call from enterprises for increased security, performance and integration with internal systems, will be formally adopted and rolled out.

For the company faced with enterprise demand for their consumer app, there is the attraction of having a customer that can and will pay a reasonable price for the service and, from a sales perspective, it can be a fantastic model for the app developer in that in most cases the enterprise customers will be seeking to buy an upgrade to something they are already using.

On the minus side, when the service they have paid for does not work, they are – quite rightly – far less forgiving. Supporting enterprise customers requires additional skills and more formal processes than are often found in purely consumer-oriented companies. If a consumer service fails for an hour, there will be little backlash – Facebook, Gmail, Skype and Twitter are all examples of consumer services where we’ve recently seen substantial downtime with no major backlash. But if you are providing and supporting an enterprise customer’s mission-critical application that then fails, for even a period of minutes, SLAs are quickly examined and any applicable penalties are quickly put into effect. Indeed, repeated failure will swiftly result in a lost contract (or worse).

So, the move to support emerging enterprise demand isn’t a trivial exercise and brings with it some serious responsibilities, but established providers of consumer services have massive advantages. They have a customer base that can generate a steady flow of leads for new enterprise customers and they can demonstrate stability, reliability and scalability by pointing to an existing user base. In contrast, smaller developers that set out to deliberately target enterprise customers are likely to find it difficult to convince corporate IT departments of their operational credibility.

While 2011 will be a big year for enterprise apps, much of the story will be about enterprises embracing proven things that work in the consumer world.

 

Tim Rea, CEO of Palringo

The editorial views expressed in this article are solely those of the author(s) and will not necessarily reflect the views of the GSMA, its Members or Associate Members