Geofencing finally emerges to enable new multi-billion markets by 2018

ENGLAND: With low-cost developer’s tools becoming available, geofencing is finally coming out of the shadows, moving beyond traditional location-based applications, to form the backbone of a host of new applications and services.

As the back-end complexities of supporting location-based services continues to escalate, developers are increasingly turning to platform providers such as carriers, Google, Qualcomm, Esri, Urban Airship, and others to provide an easy, scalable geofencing service.

In its report, “Geofencing: Technologies, Applications, and Revenue Strategies”, ABI Research investigates the full range of carrier and smartphone applications that will utilize geofencing in the coming years, including retail, enterprise, push notification, local search, social networking, ambient intelligence, etc.

Senior analyst, Patrick Connolly comments: “Collectively geofencing will enable whole new multi-billion dollar markets around these emerging areas. However, the provision of geofencing tools will be a market in its own right, forecast to reach almost $300 million in 2017. More developers are increasingly looking to pivot to enterprise applications, where companies are happy to pay for services that provide RoI, geofencing will open the door.”

Practice director, Dominique Bonte adds: “Traditionally, geofencing tools were difficult to develop, expensive to license, and didn’t have a lot of use cases. With location now ubiquitous across all handset types, and a choice of geofencing tools available from a multitude of big players, it will become an integral part of our daily lives.”