Wireless email users to top one billion by 2014

Mobile support for email by cloud vendors to commoditise wireless email

Analyst Gartner has predicted that wireless email users will top one billion by 2014, and says the commoditisation of wireless email owing to mobile support from cloud services vendors is accelerating.

Gartner research vice president Monica Basso said that the productivity benefits to be gained from wireless email are driving adoption in the wider business.

"In 2010, enterprise wireless email became a priority for organisations, with mobile workforces often making up 40 per cent of the total employee base," he said.

He explained that although most medium and large organisations in North America and Europe have deployed enterprise wireless email already, this is only, on average, to less than five per cent of the workforce.

According to the report, another driver for wireless email rollouts was that such services were beginning to integrate with social networking and other collaborative tools.

"Social networking is increasingly complementing email for interpersonal business communications," said Basso.

By 2014, social networking services will replace email as the primary means of communication for 20 per cent of business users.

Email deployed in the cloud will also grow significantly in the next three to five years, owing to increasing support for mobile access by cloud email vendors such as Google (Gmail), IBM (Lotus) and Microsoft (Hotmail).

Gartner predicted wireless email will become highly commoditised and on any device, thereby driving standardisation and price reductions on service bundles from mobile carriers.