Unified Communications Featured Article

According to the recently released IDC (News - Alert) study, Worldwide Business Mobile Email 2010-2014 Forecast and 2009 Vendor Shares, business mobile email market, is bound to expand considerably with the number of subscribers growing at a compound annual growth rate “CAGR” of 36.5 % by 2014.

However the business mobile email revenue has been predicted to grow at a CAGR of 13.2% from 2009 to 2014. After examining and analyzing the business mobile email market for 2009 to 2014, these predictions were made based on vendor revenue, subscriber trends, and market growth forecasts.

The rapid expansion in the business mobile markets has been contributed by several factors with smartphone adoption being the most dominant. The IDC report forecasts that smartphone shipments is bound to grow up to 55.4% in 2010 with current market share being 20% of all mobile phones.

Smartphone’s are being extensively used by both corporate and individual businesses for email purposes which are typically the first and the most pervasive application to be enabled. New and innovative players on the mobile OS front, along with enhanced mobile data service offering from wireless carriers are the other factors driving the business mobile email market.

Stephen Drake (News - Alert) who is the vice president of Mobility and Telecom said, “The growing number of individual-liable devices that organizations are allowing to access business data is a significant driver of business mobile email. This is often the first and most critical business application for this user base.”

Analyzing the market from a vendor perspective, RIM dominated the 2009 market with around $287.8M in business mobile email revenues and a market revenue share of 57.2%. RIM’s continued market dominance was due to the growing popularity of BlackBerry (News - Alert) devices for secure business mobile email among consumers. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s ubiquitous Exchange Active Sync across key Os such as iPhone, Symbian, Windows Mobile and webOS experienced 71.5% subscriber market share in 2009. Consequently, with the launch of Android OS and Windows Phone 7, Microsoft (News - Alert) market share is bound to grow exponentially in the year 2010 and 2011.

As the premier global provider of market intelligence, International Data Corporation “IDC” report provides a five year growth forecast by revenue and subscribers along with 2009 vendor competitive analysis of leading vendors which helps determining the next step moving forward.