The growing proliferation of smartphones and tablets, coupled with the preference to use a single device, is expected to fuel growth in the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) market over the next six years, and is expected to reach $238.39 billion by 2020, according to a study by Grand View Research.
Midsize to large businesses accounted for more than 75 percent of the overall market in 2013.
Reduced hardware/device costs along with the use of cloud-based solutions are expected to favorably impact BYOD implementation. The financial/insurance and health care markets have been among the active adopters.
The report also noted BYOD can also help small businesses drive profitability as well as improve job satisfaction.
North America led the market and accounted for 34.7 percent of the global market share in 2013, and is further expected to remain the largest regional segment over the next six years.
Meanwhile, BYOD adoption is expected to remain high in emerging markets, which can be attributed to the relatively lower provision rates of corporate mobile devices in these regions, coupled with the high degree of comfort and flexibility of individuals in working during traditional downtime.
BYOD demand in the Asia-Pacific region is expected to grow at the fastest rate of 20.6 percent from 2014 to 2020.
The report found smartphones were the most widely used BYOD devices and accounted for the largest market share in 2013.
Although notebooks are also used to a large extent, they are expected to exhibit slower growth, compared with tablets, which serve the dual purpose of higher processing power and increased portability, the study said.
“Solutions such as mobile-device management (MDM) and mobile application and content management have been employed by organizations in order to maintain security and management of data,” the report said. “Techniques including infrastructure provisioning, virtualization and containerization are used to ensure management.”
Key industry participants in the study included Cisco Systems, MobileIron, IBM and Good Technology.
Tablet adoption for business purposes among small and midsize businesses (SMBs) is gaining traction, with 97 percent saying any time, anywhere access to data and applications makes employees more effective and 83 percent indicating that making business applications and data available on smartphones and tablets would have a high or medium business impact, according to a recent report from Dimensional Research.
However, IT professionals are concerned when employees use BYOD tablets for work. The Dimensional Research report showed that 56 percent worldwide have employees using BYOD tablets for work, and in North America, this increases to 64 percent.