Mobility will be a trillion dollar business by 2014: Gartner

Worldwide mobile voice and data revenue will exceed one trillion dollars a year by 2014, according to research firm Gartner.

Mobile will generate revenue from a wide range of additional services such as content, advertising, application and service sales. Each of these will be a significant business worth several tens of billions of dollars per year.

Outlining the future of the mobile industry at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo,in in Orlando, Florida, Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at Gartner said, ''We see three major eras of mobility. The device era was characterized by iconic devices such as the Motorola RAZR and was dominated by device manufacturers.

This was followed by the application era which arrived with the iPhone, popularising application and media stores. Going forward, the service and social era will build on the application era, but it will be characterized by cloud services and streaming media. Applications will survive, but often as a component of a more complex end-to-end experience involving the cloud.''

In mature markets, smartphones will dominate device sales for the foreseeable future. However, the dominant mobile device type shipped globally will be feature phones without an identifiable OS because emerging markets dominate handset demand.
Organisations operating in emerging markets should assume smartphones will be a niche device beyond 2014.

Gartner said that many new device types such as tablets and e-book readers will emerge through 2012 and some will find a role in corporations. However, none will achieve a market share comparable to smartphones or laptops, which will remain the dominant corporate mobile devices. Mobile knowledge workers will require both a PC and a smartphone through 2014.