- Vendors are increasingly focused on addressing enterprise demand for mobility either through stand-alone applications or integrated clients
SINGAPORE, May 22, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- The growing mobile and remote workforce is pushing enterprises across Asia-Pacific to adopt comprehensive mobile collaboration services. Thanks to the rapid rise in smartphone and tablet adoption, businesses are increasingly leveraging mobility to enhance workforce productivity. This in turn will result in the APAC enterprise mobile collaboration application market experiencing immense growth in the next three years.
While basic mobile collaboration service packages -- with email, calendar, contact and IM/presence remain popular, advanced cloud-based enterprise mobile collaboration services including mobile voice and conferencing will dominate the market in the future.
In order to capture such opportunity, the UC (Unified Communications) vendors are strengthening their offerings. Frost & Sullivan has evaluated the top 11 unified communication and collaboration vendors in the Asia Pacific region and assessed them using the Frost Industry Quotient (Frost IQ) matrix. The Frost IQ matrix comprises of four quadrants: champions, challengers, defenders and explorers.
The Frost Industry Quotient - Frost IQ, is a proprietary Frost & Sullivan vendor assessment tool that accurately operationalizes and captures the merits and challenges faced by technology vendors in their respective segments and geographies. The tool aims to provide key decision makers with a localized yet objective perspective of the industry in a highly heterogeneous business environment.
In the Frost IQ for Analysis of Asia-Pacific Enterprise Mobile Collaboration Application Vendors 2014, Microsoft and IBM have been positioned in the champions' quadrant, based on a combination of market share performance and future growth strategies as determined by Frost & Sullivan research studies. In total, the top two vendors accounted for almost 85% per cent of the revenue generated in the segment.
From a future growth perspective, the Frost IQ also recognizes the efforts of Cisco, ShoreTel, Avaya, NEC, Aastra, and Alcatel-Lucent for their efforts in the market, be it in regards to the technological capabilities they have demonstrated, or the effective go-to-market strategies they have adopted. At present, these participants may have a smaller market share, but are well-aligned with future demand trends following their strong value proposition.
Despite the dominant position of the top two global vendors, enterprising players are steadily emerging in the Asia Pacific region. These include the likes of Huawei, Unify and Deltapath, all of which are featured in the Frost IQ.
The performance of all the vendors was benchmarked against unit shipments of the mobility licenses including bundled packages and stand-alone applications.
Shuishan Lu, Industry Analyst, ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific, believes that the outlook for the market is favourable.
Lu says, "The increased usage of smart devices and rapid development of wireless networks in the region has been a boon for enterprise mobile collaboration in the Asia-Pacific region. Enterprises are also leveraging UC (Unified Communications) applications to gain competitive advantage in the market, improve employee productivity and facilitate an efficient and conducive working environment."
New analysis from Frost & Sullivan showed that the number of active mobile applications users stood at 4.7 million in 2013 and is forecasted to reach 7.4 million users by 2018, with a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 7.4%.
"The forecast for this market segment is highly promising. An increasing maturity of enterprise UC infrastructure and the need for real time collaboration will continue to stimulate demand and growth opportunities in this area over the next few years. Of course, market growth will be affected by challenges. These include increasing operating costs, increasing competition, and data and information security concerns," states Lu.
The Frost IQ (FIQ) for Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific Enterprise Mobile Collaboration Application Vendors 2014, covers mobile collaboration applications including email, voice, messaging, conferencing, enterprise social networking from mobility perspective in the Asia Pacific region. The base year of the study is CY2013. The parameters used to determine relative positioning on the FIQ matrix include market share, product/service strategy, people/skills strategy, and ecosystem and business strategy.