Businesses increase spending on mobility

Analysts have discovered that businesses are becoming more and more willing to raid their piggybanks to spend on mobility, particularly at the smaller end of the market.

According to the latest research, the percentage of staff now classified as mobile workers in SMEs has risen two percentage points since last year and has now reached the 50 percent mark.

A new report from Yankee Group has found large enterprises will be spending most on mobile data services, including email and sales applications.

Small businesses, by contrast, favour the more bread and butter mobile approach and are keeping spending mainly on voice, although Yankee Group predicts that in the future they will follow the same data-centric path as their larger counterparts.

Big businesses, however, are looking beyond mobile data towards the uptake of FMC (fixed-mobile convergence) with 41 percent of large enterprises saying they consider 'one phone' capability an important factor in managing their voice usage.

A separate report from research consultancy Analysys predicts the mobile services market at large will continue to grow, hitting nearly $200bn by 2011.