Compass Intelligence (www.compassintelligence.com) recently surveyed 1383 IT decision-makers and asked them "Thinking about your company as a whole, which of the following carriers, if any, does your company or organization use for company-provided cell phones? Often companies give employees a choice of more than one carrier." As you can see below, the numbers look really close to market share data that you see out there in the analyst world, of course the numbers may vary but the comparisons of the vendors is pretty close to what we see out there in the news and analyst reports. AT&T and Verizon are running neck-and-neck in terms of the top choice of business IT decision-makers for cell phones, while Sprint runs a very distant 3rd. T-Mobile hits 4th with about 11 percent of the respondents stating they use T-Mobile's cell phones.
Businesses today are really looking for those providers that can provide them business-oriented devices such as Blackberries, Treos, and others. They are also looking for devices that can help with productivity. We also asked these same decision-makers about their top challenges for 2008 and 2009 and the top choice selected (44 percent) was increasing productivity of the workers. This being said, devices including cellphones, smartphones, handheld computing devices, and even laptops must address each industries specific productivity concerns. Applications that are moving to a mobile environment will be very successful if they can be marketed and even give ROI on improving productivity with workers across industry. This means some applications will have to be specific to the industry in which the business user is in. For example an E-Prescription application on a Doctor's smartphone or handheld, or access to Manufacturing Execution System for a Factory Floor Manager. I would love to hear about your thoughts on the future of business applications, mobile and non-mobile. Please let me know what you think. Have a Happy Fourth of July!
U.S Business Decision-Maker Choice of Cell Phone Vendor, 2008 (Sample Size: 1383)
Source: Compass Intelligence, 06/08