Juniper: Mobile cloud to reach 130m business users
Juniper Research has predicted a bright future for mobile cloud computing, finding in a new report that the number of enterprise customers using cloud-based mobile applications will grow to 130 million by 2014.
The mobile cloud relies on platform-as-a-service (PaaS) products, such as Salesforce.com's Force.com, Amazon Web Services or Google's App Engine. Juniper said on Tuesday that the success of the mobile cloud will be helped by broader use of PaaS.
Mobile cloud computing refers to a mobile application infrastructure where the storage and processing are both hosted on remote infrastructure. It opens smartphone-like app access to 'feature phones', which offer less processing power than smartphones but are far more widely used.
In a report published in August, ABI Research predicted that the majority of mobile applications will eventually be hosted on the cloud. Mobile cloud applications available today include Gmail, Google Maps and some navigation tools.
While the mobile cloud reaches beyond the world of high-end smartphones, Juniper said the success of the iPhone and its App Store has had a key effect in making mobile applications more attractive and in increasing the number of mobile enterprise applications.
In addition, cloud providers are increasingly opening up their application programming interfaces (APIs), making it easier for developers to create applications that work across multiple thin-client and browser platforms, according to Juniper.
The cloud-based ecosystem growing up around mobile enterprise apps offers benefits for developers and enterprise customers, the research firm added.
"For developers, the cloud opens up a far wider potential audience for their products; for enterprise customers, outsourcing application management to a remote third-party, costed on a scalable, pay-per-use basis, offers far more flexibility combined with a significant reduction in capital expenditure," said Windsor Holden, author of the the Mobile Cloud Applications report, in a statement.
In addition, the growth in mobile cloud applications will provide an opportunity for storage and infrastructure providers to introduce mobile-specific cloud services, according to Juniper.
Juniper said it believes enterprise applications will provide the majority of cloud-based mobile application revenues by 2014, with consumer applications such as games, social networking and music services generating more than one-quarter of revenues by then.