SMB Demand for Productivity Oriented Mobile Apps

Small businesses account for two-thirds of all new employment in America, according to the historical U.S. government statistics. Developing trends within this key sector are therefore a leading market indicator of the nation's economic stability and forward-looking performance.

That said, new U.S. business spending research, that was performed by In-Stat, would indicate that some things are starting to trend upwards.

According to the latest market study by In-Stat, small and medium businesses (SMBs) plan to increase their spending on wireless data services by 42 percent from 2010 to 2015.

Moreover, U.S. small office and home office (SOHO) businesses will lead the category, forecast to increase their spending by over 46 percent on wireless data from 2010 to 2015.

New Productivity Oriented Wireless Data Applications

"Voice has become a commodity, with growth in voice services essentially being stagnant across all sizes of business," says Greg Potter, In-Stat Data Analyst.

Messaging services have been in demand, but the new procurement outlook is stagnant, with marginal increases or decreases -- depending on the the size of business.

In-Stat believes that future growth is all about providing data access to smartphones, business-centric media tablets, and netbook PCs. Clearly, new productivity-oriented mobile apps and related cloud based services are helping to stimulate this demand.

According to the latest market study by ABI Research, users of enterprise B2E (business-to-employee) and B2C (business to customer) smartphone and media tablet mobile applications (apps) are forecast to grow at a CAGR of nearly 90 percent -- and exceed 830 million active users by 2016.

In-Stats latest market study highlights include:

• SMB businesses in total (SMB includes SOHO, small and medium businesses) consume about half of all wireless services on a revenue basis.
• The consumption jumps to almost three-fourths when one is only considering corporate liable expenditures.
• Total mobile handset spending is set to rise over 10 percent from 2010 to 2015.
• The construction vertical segment will spend 120 million in the wireless device segment in 2012.
• In 2013, the retail trade segment will spend 2.8 billion in wireless voice services.