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With 400 mn mobile phone subscribers, and the growth showing no signs of plateauing, India is expectedly being touted as a mobile hotspot globally. What has been driving growth for the last few years is the huge potential in rural and semi-urban areas where the quality of infrastructure and services in fixed line is not good. So today, the mobile is being seen as a tool to connect the unconnected. Indian operators have done a commendable job of reaching out to the remotest of areas in many parts of the country.

Today, mobile has become the only medium to reach out to a large part of Indias population. For example, some estimates suggest that there are at least 30 mn mobile subscribers in India who do not have a bank account. Mobile could be a great medium to get them into the banking system. Today, many state governments are building applications that would make it possible for people in the remotest areas to access common citizen services through their mobile phones.

Today, no consumer business worth its name is ignoring the potential of reaching out to customers through mobile applications, for customer service, marketing and of late for transactions. By and large, that is what is driving Indian enterprise mobile applications adoption in the initial phase of the market rollout.

That is both good news and bad.The good is that when the adoption becomes mainstream, it would suddenly see exponential growth. The bad news is that this is also the reason why the transition from a hype cycle to an adoption cycle is taking so much time. Today, the market size of enterprise mobile applications in India is a very small fraction of the potential.

CyberMedia Research        DQ Estimates

Although a growth of 61% is by no means trivial, it is on a much smaller base and is expected to accelerate further over the coming few years

According to Dataquest estimates, the total market size of enterprise mobile applications in India stood at Rs 560 crore in FY 09, up from Rs 347 crore in FY 08a growth of 61%. While that growth figure looks quite impressive, it is on a small base and we believe that will accelerate for the next few years.

It is important to explain what we have included in this. The market, the way we have estimated, includes applications either sold as a product or developed on a customized basis but does not include other softwares such as platforms and middleware. It does not include services, unless they are built into the application cost, as in case of a grounds-up development of an application from scratch. And of course, it does not include applications or content which are paid for by customers through operators; ie consumer applications such as caller tunes, ringtones, pictures, and games.

There are two reasons why the enterprise mobile applications market has still not reached a critical mass. First: the adoption is happening more on the front-end, which typically requires a longer decision cycle as well as longer implementation time. Secondly: most integrators in the enterprise space are still trying to push traditional mobile applications which has worked in developed markets, which are B2E or B2B applications, and are targeted at enhancing productivity and efficiency, as part of their solution to the CIOs.

On the other hand, last year saw significant take-offs in customer facing applications such as m-banking, which was launched by many large banks through downloadable midlets, WAP sites as well as through SMS. Then there was m-payments, where India is now being seen as an early adopter, as well as a lot of other m-commerce applications.

In the banking sector, ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, State Bank of India, and Union Bank of India are the early adopters of GPRS based services while almost every bank worth its name offers SMS based mobile banking services. The payment space, still nascent, has already attracted multiple players such as Ngpay, Obopay, Oxicash and mCheck. In travel, most players including Kingfisher, Jet Airways, Indigo, Makemytrip, Yatra and IRCTC offer GPRS based mobile services while many others offer SMS based services. Ngpay, which has created a mobile marketplace, has attracted many partners who offer their products and services to customers through it for m-commerce. These include companies as varied as PVR Cinemas to Amar Chitrakatha, Landmark to Asian Skyshop.

Major players in the application space include Mobiquest, ValueFirst, Obopay, Mospay, CanvasM, Mindtree, Spice Digital (earlier Cellebrum), Telenity, Netxcell, among others.

The adoption in the intra-enterprise space is low but gaining momentum. We are still at a stage where only a few sectors like retail and BFSI are using mobility apps for conventional areas like sales force automation, transaction management, etc. Field force automation and integration, mobile transaction management, asset tracking and management, bill payments/receipts, ticketing, Intranet applications such as executive MIS on mobile, are currently in vogue. However other areas like CRM, remote data collection and management, queue buster solutions, integrated handhold solutions with other technology solutions like RFID, location-based services are also fast catching up.

Vertical-wise
Its a well known fact that the first and primary adopter of enterprise mobile applications has been retail. The next rung is occupied by BFSI and pharma, and they are closely followed by the transportation and logistics department.

A new entrant on the mobility street has been the government. Governments across India are busy mobilizing their operations and their workforces. The sector has emerged as an enthusiastic consumer (of mobile enterprise apps), and has niche requirements of developing its wireless capability, especially for domains of security, reliability, and scalability of its operations. Another area that the government is exploring is tracking and locational services.

Apart from these, there are a lot of sectors that hold huge potential for effectively deploying enterprise mobility solutions. Some of these can substantially contribute towards crafting the success story of enterprise mobility. One of the most promising sectors is healthcare. From blood bank tracking to bedside monitoring to real-time monitoring of surgeries, healthcare is one area that holds tremendous scope for deployment of mobility solutions. The other potential verticals are defense, aviation, energy utility, and telecom.

The Challenges
While even sending bulk SMSes to the sales force was considered to be a mobility sort of adoption (and a large number of our SMBs are still in that stage) a couple of years back, we have now evolved to reach what the experts call the email stage. A major chunk of enterprise mobile applications in India right now is mobile email. So clearly, maturity is an issue, and on that front at least, the growth rate speaks volumes about the potential that the Indian market holds.

That apart, because market maturity will only come gradually, the biggest challenge in the way of enterprise mobility applications is the security of data being transferred. Most vendors concur that the first question their customers put up is related to the security of data being transmitted. They want to ascertain how reliable their mobility solution is.

However, experts insist that security vis-a-vis mobile applications, is no longer an issue that cant be dealt with effectively. That is because most developers are now taking care of security issues right from the stage of inception.

The other big factor, that has been especially relevant to the Indian market is the low RoI, that leaves little incentive for application developers. And though a lot of players have mushroomed in the application development picture, a lot of them are targeting the overseas market, rather than the Indian one. The Indian market is more lucrative for VAS application developers, given the consumer base.

Apart from that, integration is another issue. Although most mobile applications are a sub-set or even an extension of the business applications, their integration with the overall IT infrastructure remains a challenge for most enterprises, especially for mid-sized ones. And with unified communications being the buzzword across the industry, the convergence between voice, video, and data points has become more crucial than ever. Thus, one of the biggest ailments seems to be patching-up of the pieces. Accommodation of an application in the existing infrastructure has always been a yardstick for success in India. But enterprise mobile apps, though displaying an integration drive, are yet to reach that stage of seamless integration.

Unless that happens, it is difficult to expect that intra-enterprise applications would really take-off.

Mehak Chawla
mehakc@cybermedia.co.in

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