Mobile device proliferation has IT departments reconsidering how to best deliver increasingly business-critical mobile IT services.

While business analysts are now more experienced with identifying the right use cases and design requirements for mobile applications, designing, developing, integrating, managing, and maintaining these apps remains a significant task. Mobilizing and integrating manual business processes and workflows with modern mobile platforms is not only complex but costly, particularly when considering that many legacy applications and systems are not being abandoned. Creating new mobile applications to integrate with legacy systems requires both a high degree of specialized skills and additional software. As a result, enterprises are quickly discovering that mobile enablement is not only costly and time-consuming, but that managing and maintaining their deployment environments may be best handled by an external 3rd party.

VDC sees expanded usage of mobile devices to facilitate day-to-day business as an enabler for IT to reassert the importance of its role in digital transformation initiatives. However, considering that these initiatives are (likely) already underway, selecting the right partner(s) to deliver a suite of more reliable and robust mobile IT services will become increasingly important – particularly for organizations where mobile initiatives have become business-critical. VDC's research shows that even the largest enterprises are inadequately staffed with the mobile expertise required to properly manage and maintain a rapidly growing mobile deployment environment. Professional services vendors have proved their ability to deliver strategic business impact to their customers, not just operating cost reductions. Additionally, these vendors are increasingly well equipped to help their customer implement mobile innovations with more speed and less pain.  

That said, end-to-end “as a service” mobility solutions will ultimately be the de facto choice for many enterprises going forward. Considering the early stages of true mobile enablement in enterprise, managed mobility services from managed service providers (MSPs), communication service providers (CSPs), and systems integrators (SIs) are poised to benefit from the current mobile boom. Due to limited mobile IT support capabilities, VDC expects organizations to expand their relationships with third-party solution providers that specialize in mobile solution support and integration. The services opportunity will expand well beyond traditional mobile hardware support and break-fix services that are common today. Mobility-oriented services to support expanding deployment environments, application and database integration, as well as security, asset management and logistics services will be key areas of focus for professional services firms going forward. 

VDC has just released a comprehensive Report on the market opportunity for Mobile Professional Services. Vendors were profiled in this Report include:

CSPs: AT&T, Sprint, Verizon Business, and Vodafone Global Enterprise
SIs: Atos, Cognizant, HCL, IBM Global Services, and Infosys
Mobile-First Solution Providers: DMI, Enterprise Mobile, Stratix, Vox Mobile and Zebra Technologies

View the 2017 Enterprise Mobility & Connected Devices Research Outline to learn more.