More and more corporates will allow their workforce to bring in personal mobile devices and grant them access to enterprise applications in the coming years to enhance business agility, research firm IDC said, estimating growth in 2014 in what is called the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) market in Asia Pacific (ex-Japan) at 40.4% on year.
In a statement Tuesday, IDC said it expects that close to 155 million consumer smartphones will be used in the BYOD model across the region in 2014, while tablet BYOD will grow to nearly 4 million units, a year-on-year growth of 62.7%. BYOD devices include smartphones, tablets and laptops or notebook PCs.
Notebook PC, on the other hand, would see a steep decline as the PC industry slows down and BYOD users migrate to other platforms, the research firm said. It expects just 3.1 million units of consumer notebook PC to be utilized under the BYOD model, a year-on-year decline of 20%.
Ian Song, research manager for Enterprise Mobility at IDC Asia Pacific said that the momentum of BYOD has definitely increased over the past 12 month and they expect it will continue the upward swing in 2014 and well in 2015.
IDC studies “Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) Bring Your Own Device End-User Survey 2014” and “Asia Pacific Bring Your Own Device 2014-2018 Analysis and Forecast”, demonstrate that mobile devices utilized under the BYOD model have accounted for 22.5%, 4.9% and 11.7% of all consumer smartphone, tablet and notebook PC shipped in 2013, respectively.
The research firm feels that enterprises across the Asia Pacific are also becoming more open to the idea of BYOD as a way to drive mobility in their organizations. Close to 60% of all surveyed organizations across the region said that they have some kind of mobility policy that caters to the practice of BYOD.
“The price of device has also dropped to a level where increased proliferation becomes possible,” Song said. He added that BYOD smartphone utilization will peak around 2016 to 2017, and tablets will peak around 2017 – 2018.
“While BYOD has a capability to streamline some of the internal operations, personally-owned devices will not be able to drive core business functions without compromising security and management.”
IDC expects that developed markets like Australia and Singapore will see a decline in BYOD adoption as early as the first half of 2016 while developing markets, it said, will take quite a bit longer before smartphone and tablet BYOD start to decline.
