Given the hard dollar ROI and positive satisfaction ratings, it looks like more organizations should be looking to take mobility to the next level.

Applications are the raison d’etre for unified communications, and one of the great opportunities for the technology comes in extending those applications to mobile devices. Frost & Sullivan's Senior Industry Analyst Jeanine Sterling conducted a Webinar this past week where she discussed the results of their recent study on Premium Mobile Enterprise Applications.

The study was conducted with 300 US and Canadian enterprise customers equally divided between organizations with more than 500 employees and fewer than 500, and explored their existing and planned implementations for four premium mobile applications:

* Mobile Office: Email, PIM, intra-office communication, and collaboration.

* Mobile Workforce Management: Web-based tracking through GPS-equipped mobile handheld devices to locate and manage mobile field workers and their tasks.

* Next-Gen Fleet Management: Web-based tracking and cellular/GPS devices installed in fleet vehicles for vehicle location, geo-fencing, maps, engine diagnostics and sensors.

* Mobile Sales Force Automation: Extending corporate CRM/SFA backend systems to mobile phones for access to product, pricing, inventory, and customer data in order to perform contact management and order management functions.

The survey looked to ascertain user acceptance, overall satisfaction, and importantly, obstacles to adoption. One of the metrics I use in assessing companies' development in mobile applications is whether they have progressed beyond mobile email. Ms. Sterling found that Mobile Office (which included mobile email) did lead the pack with implementations among 57% of respondents, but the other applications that could be characterized as mobile communications-enabled business processes (mCEBP) fared surprisingly well with implementations in 39% to 47% of respondents.

Ms. Sterling identified a total of 12 market drivers that helped account for the high penetration, but she singled out four of them as key:

* Major independent software vendors (ISVs) have gotten into mobile applications in a big way

* The advantages and flexibility offered by Software as a Service (SaaS) options

* Greater support from the wireless carriers

* Increased emphasis on solution standardization which minimizes the customization requirement

The one clear message that came through was that organizations that had implemented the applications were glad that they did. Satisfaction levels (i.e. responses "Satisfied" or "Very Satisfied") ranged between 85% and 90%.

The more interesting responses dealt with the reasons why users had not implemented these applications. The number one reason, cited by 70 to 75% of the non-user respondents, was "No need".

When you took those users out of the mix, virtually all of the other objections dealt with cost. The actual objections were expressed as "High TCO", "Cost of implementation", "Cost of hardware", or "Unclear ROI benefits", but in each case the issue got down to cost or more specifically, the perceived value of the solution.

As with many UC applications, that value of these mobile applications could be measured in hard or soft dollars. Those who had implemented mobile applications reported the primary ROI metrics they had considered, and those responses did include a mix of hard and soft dollar benefits. On the "soft dollar" side were "Increased user productivity" and "Increased customer satisfaction"--but "Reduced labor expense", "Higher job completion rates", and "Expedited cash flow" definitely rang the cash register. When we classified the responses by "hard" versus "soft" dollar ROI, Mobile Office responses were about evenly divided between hard and soft dollar benefits, while hard dollar ROI benefits dominated in the other three key drivers.

In conclusion, Ms. Sterling's study and analysis were timely and dead on the mark. The two items that stood out were the percentage of enterprise customers that have moved beyond push email towards more line-of-business related mobile applications, and the overwhelmingly positive satisfaction ratings among those who have taken the plunge. Given the hard dollar ROI and those positive satisfaction ratings, it looks like more organizations should be looking to take mobility to the next level.