Commoditisation of wireless e-mail is increasing, according to Gartner which attributes the reason to standardisation, interoperability and growing competition from e-mail servers and services.
Social networking is increasingly complementing e-mail for interpersonal business communications as wireless e-mail integrates with social networking and collaboration.
The research firm says this increase in demand is addressed by vendors by pursuing differentiation in the areas of collaboration, applications and the cloud.
These accounts included large, mid-sized and small organisations, as well as individual professionals. Monica Basso, research vice president at Gartner, noted that the primary reason for the increase in the adoption of wireless e-mail is the resulting gains in productivity.
Today, enterprise wireless e-mail is still a priority for organisations, whose mobile workforce are up to 40 per cent of the total employee base. Basso added that although most mid-sized and large organisations in North America and Europe are using enterprise wireless e-mail already, on average, they are for less than five per cent of the workforce.
Commenting on the cloud, Basso said that due to the ease of access, the cloud will generate indirect competition in the wireless e-mail software market and will transform it in the long term.
“Cloud e-mail offerings from software and service players, such as Google’s Gmail, will begin to be adopted, pulling wireless e-mail implementations into the cloud as well,” said Basso. “Research In Motion and other wireless e-mail vendors will build partnerships with cloud providers to address their customers’ cloud strategies.”
