International Data Corp (IDC) has forecast that enterprise mobility-enabled worker populations in Asia Pacific, excluding Japan, will be 66.1 million by 2009, up from 37.4 million in 2005.

The four factors driving the growth are the adoption of mobile voice and data, the availability of more appropriate business applications, increasing numbers in the mobile workforce, and the efficiency and flexibility mobility brings to business processes.

Telecommunications research manager of IDC Asia-Pacific, Claus Mortensen, said that by this year Thailand would be ranked the 10th country in a list of 11 which have mobile workforce populations of about one million, and will climb to number nine by 2009. The top three countries with the most mobile workforce populations are China, India and Australia.

He said that as businesses move towards mobility and extend their activities beyond traditional wired enterprises, managing communication, convergence, and complexity were important.

The evolution of mobility enterprises can be divided into three stages. The first is applications such as e-mail, personal information management, and Internet access. The second stage is applications such as sales-force automation and field-force automation. The third is mobile customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management, and electronic commerce.

Thailand's mainstream businesses are now generally between stages one and two. Meanwhile, even though a trend analysis of the Thai mobile industry reveals that mobile subscribers are likely to reach 32 million this year, growing at 7 per cent from 30 million last year, the mobile enterprise market is adopting the trend.

A Frost & Sullivan study in February suggested that Thailand's mobile enterprises were still struggling to move to a reliable telecom infrastructure to enable online data transfer. In such a highly hardware-centric environment there are opportunities for embedded software in handsets.

The growth will be fuelled by multiple small- and medium-sized deals, some of which show potential for growth into significantly larger deals.

The global mobile enterprise market has been forecast to be worth US$6.22 billion (Bt237 billion) by 2009. North America will continue to be the biggest market, while the Asia-Pacific region is the fastest growing and likely to surpass Europe by 2008.

Asia Pacific had a compound annual growth rate of 62 per cent from 2005 to 2009, while North America grew at 34 per cent and Europe at 31 per cent.

The marketing vice president of Advance Info Service's enterprise department, Yip Hon Mun, said the firm's enterprise business this year was expected to grow at 50 per cent. "It is very young. Even though it is very small, it is growing very fast," said Mun.

He said potential applications for enterprises were mobile e-mail, personal information management, push mail, mobile sales force applications, fleet management, and mobile virtual private networks.

asina@nationgroup.com

Asina Pornwasin

The Nation