ARCHIVES: This is legacy content from before Marketing Dive acquired Mobile Marketer in early 2017. Some information, such as publication dates, may not have migrated over. Check out the new Marketing Dive site for the latest marketing news.

Mobile cloud revenues to reach $39B by 2016: study

Mobile cloud-based enterprise services are expected to reach $39B by 2016 as carriers increasingly offer businesses unified communications suites, per a new study by Juniper Research.

The study found that a large proportion of the revenues represent a shift in how services were traditionally offered discretely in isolation rather than in combination. Additionally, the study shows how cloud-based services can be helpful for customer retention.

?It is clear that we?re witnessing a substantial migration to cloud-based services, in the consumer as well as the enterprise space, a migration which is being driven  both by the fundamental advantages of cloud with a widespread adoption of smartphones and tablets,? said Windsor Holden, principal analyst at Juniper Research, Hampshire, England.

Security scare
According to Juniper, one of the main reasons companies are afraid to use cloud services is because of data security.

When surveyed, companies were worried about both secure access and secure storage in the cloud.

?If you are considering migrating to a cloud-based platform, ensure that you adopt a solution that dynamically categorizes the data for you and tags and follows the data,? Mr. Holden said.

Additionally, Mr. Holden said that it is important that  companies be in control of their own cloud.

?Enterprises should be aware of the physical location of their data,? Mr. Holden said. ?The consumer or enterprise in country A may store or process their information in a company whose head office is in country B but whose servers are in country C.

?Indeed, ascertaining that location should form a critical form of the evaluation process before you commit to that cloud service provider, he said.

In addition to security, the study found that consumers are also concerned about how to achieve a substantial rate on investment .

?Perhaps most surprising is the extent to which enterprises are moving to the cloud without having performed any substantial analysis of the ROI that will result from such migration,? Mr. Holden said.

?This is despite the fact that in most enterprise surveys, cloud ROI ? specifically, the lack of means to demonstrate cloud ROI ? is usually flagged as the second most prevalent concern behind data security,? he said.

The study also warns about the power of data outages to severely impact cloud-based services unless data redundancy in the cloud is improved.

In the cloud
The Juniper study shows  that mobile clouds will be a vital part of carriers? strategies in the future.

?In the enterprise space, it?s fair to say that cloud mobility is likely to receive an enormous fillip as carriers essentially seek to develop a double-sided revenue model by opening their APIs to SaaS providers and thereby creating upstream revenues through service aggregation,? Mr. Holden said.

?Meanwhile, as they migrate their existing enterprise base across to cloud-based unified communications suites, we should see total revenues from enterprise cloud mobility services reach $39 billion annually by 2016,? he said.

Final Take
Lauren Johnson, editorial assistant on Mobile Marketer, New York.