Summary Bullets:

• Mobility spending plans are trending up, with 73% of companies planning to increase mobility spending over the next 12 months, 25% planning to spend at the same rate, and only 2% planning to spend less.
• Just how much companies plan to increase mobility budgets, however, varies by company size, region, and industry.

A recent Current Analysis survey, completed in August, asked 650 companies about their use of transformational services including cloud, collaboration, and mobility services. Mobility was not the highest priority for IT budgets, with cloud and IT security services ranking higher in strategic importance on a scale of 1 to 7, with “1” the highest and “7” the lowest ranking. Both big data and data center initiatives ranked about the same as mobility (averaging about a 4 out of 7), but mobility budgets were on the rise; over 70% of the companies surveyed plan to increase their spending over the next 12 months.

When looking at which companies plan to increase their mobility spend the most (or least), there were some interesting variances depending on region, size, and industry. Roughly dividing the sample into SMBs and large enterprises (i.e., dividing the sample by those with less than 99 employees up to those with 2,500 employees, and comparing them with companies with 2,500 to 10,000+ employees), there were some telling differences. The largest companies planned the biggest budget increases, with 72% planning increases of over 25%. In contrast, only 2% of the smaller companies will increase budgets by 25% or more; 16% will increase budgets by 11-25%, 35% will increase their spending by just 5-10%, and another 25% will keep their mobility budgets level next year.

The biggest spenders by industry were the energy, manufacturing, professional services, and telecoms verticals, together representing 54% of the “big spenders,” i.e., those that are planning mobility spending increases of over 25%. Even healthcare, government, retail, and transport companies, typically viewed as likely verticals for mobility deployments, were not planning this level of mobility budget increases. Regionally, Latin America and Asia-Pacific plan on increasing spending the most, with 18% and 17% of companies in these regions, respectively, planning to increase mobility budgets by over 10%, compared with 9% and 14% increases for EMEA and North America, respectively.

Most of these differences by segment make intuitive sense; the larger companies and those in emerging markets plan the biggest mobility spending increases. In terms of verticals, industries that require a lot of field force mobility and/or have large traveling fleets and substantial mobile cargo requirements are planning to spend the most on technologies that make these workers and assets more productive.