Smartphone adoption forcing expansion of mobility strategies

2012 International CES, BOSTON, USA: While mobility form factor is getting thinner, as seen at 2012 International CES, worldwide business smartphone shipment statistics continue to grow at impressive rates.

According to, “Global Business Smartphone Sales,” from the Strategy Analytics Wireless Enterprise Strategies (WES) service, the worldwide business smartphone market –of all sizes -- reached a total of 174 million units shipped in 2011, and 216 million units will be sold worldwide in 2012.

Gina Luk, Senior Analyst of Wireless Enterprise Strategies and co-author of the forecast report, says: “The enthusiastic adoption of personal-liable smartphones for work is forcing organizations to develop expanded mobility strategies focused less on providing devices and more on managing the security and access to devices, applications and data. Enterprises have truly embraced the personal-liable user model because of the huge rise in numbers of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in use, the need to cut devices costs, and the availability of MDM solutions which help IT managers to manage a heterogeneous device environment in an effective manner.”

This trend has a definitive impact on the corporate-liable versus personal-liable split of business use devices throughout the forecast period (2010-2016). Companies worldwide are allowing employees to leverage the device of their choice for business use.

“Shortly, nearly 55 percent of all business use smartphones worldwide will be personal-liable,” said Andrew Brown, director of Wireless Enterprise Strategies and co-author of the forecast reports.