Mobile cloud to sum-up $9.5bn in three years

HAMPSHIRE, UK: New research has found that annual revenues from cloud-based mobile applications will reach nearly $9.5 billion by 2014.

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This growth would be 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).

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 mobile cloud applications and services 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.

Windsor Holden, report author, said: "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 also added that 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 revenue 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.