LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The battle for the supremacy in the smartphone and tablet domains has heated up—following Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility, the launch of new lines of mass-market smart phones by Nokia and Samsung, and the decision by HP to dismiss its WebOS hardware product lines including the TouchPad tablets. Motorola’s acquisition will allow Google to enrich the Android ecosystem. It will also enhance competition in mobile application development and distribution, including those mobiles adopted by small and medium businesses.
“AMI’s latest SMB market study,” says Lorenza Brescia, EMEA Cloud Services Director at AMI Partners, “reveals high levels of adoption of Mobile cloud-based applications through smart phones and tablets by Western European SMBs. In particular SMBs are expressing a strong interest in mobile cloud services that go beyond productivity applications to more business management-focused applications, such as customer relationship management and business intelligence delivered to mobile devices.” Increased purchase probability for business applications on mobile devices presents a potential market opportunity of $13 billion amongst the 11 million SMBs in Europe’s largest markets (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, U.K.).
“The offer of the right bundled services for mobile devices,” continued Ms. Brescia, “on top of basic voice and data offerings will be key for service providers to maintain and gain market share in the SMB market. The results of our study will give powerful insights for mobile service providers starting to shape their mobile cloud services strategy.”
A key to supremacy for the big technology companies will be the ability to create new business models for mobile customer engagement linked with applications that integrate all areas of business management (from sales and marketing to customer care). As Motorola phones will likely run native Google applications, other Android partners won't have the same obligation and will thus be free to develop attractive alternatives. Microsoft can still position itself as the only OS that's entirely hardware-independent. Google’s acquisition of Motorola could have the effect of turning more handset manufacturers to Windows Phone to diversify their portfolios away from the now less neutral Android.
“The capability to integrate powerful business applications on smart phones and tablets,” says Brescia, “will facilitate and accelerate their adoption in business environments. AMI’s study confirms the strong interest of Western European SMB Businesses who are expected to spend $3,010 million in 2011 on smart phone devices, growing to $4,927 million by 2015.”
Related Studies
AMI's 2011 SMB Cloud Playbook - Strategic and Tactical GTM Planning Guides provide a tactical framework for architecting cloud-based services offerings to meet the growing demand for cloud services "bundles" and a perspective on cloud-related dynamics shaping up in the SMB space, including:
- Cloud-related needs among four types of SMB segments; behavioral and usage characteristics; future adoption plans
- Cloud and ICT spending, market opportunity, price sensitivity
- Service bundling preferences and demand uplift; vendor value propositions and offers/bundles
- Purchase channel mix and capabilities
Studies are available in Western Europe for each of the following countries: France, Germany, Italy, Spain and UK.
For more information about these studies, AMI-Partners, or our global SMB research, please call 212-944-5100, e-mail ask_ami@ami-partners.com or visit www.ami-partners.com.
About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.
AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence — with a strong focus on global small and medium businesses (SMBs), and extending into large enterprises and home-based businesses. The AMI-Partners mission is to empower clients for success with the highest quality data, business strategy perspectives and “go-to-market” solutions. AMI was founded in 1996. Since its inception, the firm has built a world-class management team, each with ten to fifteen years’ experience in IT, telecom, online communications or multimedia.
AMI-Partners has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, internet, telecommunications and business services companies. The firm is well known for its IT and internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets; its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 23 countries; and its proprietary database of SMBs, Cloud services studies and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey-based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis.