Revenues from Mobile Cloud Application to Reach $9.5 Billion by 2014

A recently published report from Juniper Research shows that the annual revenue from cloud-based mobile applications is expected to reach $9.5 billion by 2014, mainly due to an increase demand for converged, collaborative services, but also courtesy of the wide adoption of mobile broadband services. Moreover, the research firm notes that the growth should also be fueled by deployment of key technological enablers, including HTML5 and the Smart Card Web Server (SCWS) from the Open Mobile Alliance.

According to the report, enterprise applications are expected to account for most of the revenues in the area within the following five years, and businesses are expected to seek more and more to capitalize on the ability of Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers to deliver flexible data storage solutions to synchronized office services. Even so, it seems that the consumer-oriented apps are still expected to account for a large percentage of the total revenues, due to subscriptions to various services and to advertising from cloud-based social networks.

Moreover, Juniper Research also notes that a wide range of enterprise customers are still not ready to entrust their personal data to remote third-parties, not to mention that these concerns are fueled by the recently announced high-profile data losses amongst corporate mobile users. Dr Windsor Holden, author of the report, commented “Not only is it imperative for cloud providers to ensure that access to and storage of customer data is secure, but that the procedures that they put in place in this regard – including data backup strategies – are transparent to the customer.”

The new report from Juniper Research also shows that:
- While the onset of a cloud-based ecosystem may further erode the strength of the mobile operator/customer relationship, cloud offers operators the opportunity to develop new revenue streams as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and PaaS providers
- 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.