Revenues from cloud-based mobile applications are expected to reach nearly $9.5bn by 2014, due to 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), according to a new research by Juniper Research.
The research found that enterprise applications will account for the majority of revenues over the next five years, with businesses looking to capitalise on the ability of platform as a service (PaaS) providers to offer data storage offerings allied to device agnostic, synchronised office services.
However, consumer-oriented apps will comprise a 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, the firm said.
The new report on mobile cloud applications and services also warned that many enterprise customers still remained wary of entrusting their personal data to remote third-parties.
The research also found that, even the onset of a cloud-based ecosystem may further erode the strength of the mobile operator/customer relationship, the cloud offers operators the opportunity to develop new revenue streams as infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and PaaS providers.
The 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, the firm said.
