Enterprise size affects desk phone defection, BlackBerry support, says report

Consumers have been canceling landlines in favor of just mobile phones, and the trend is spreading to the enterprise, says a new Broadsoft report based on research by the Cohen Research Group. Among the enterprise IT leaders surveyed, 44% said that at least a quarter of their workforce was operating solely with a mobile phone.

"Looking at what they’ll support in the future [73% of] IT leaders believe that mobile devices will eventually replace today’s desk phones," states the report, with 26% believing this will happen in the next one to two years, 34% in the next three to five years.

The more employees to support and more offices an IT leader was in charge of, the survey found, the more likely they were than those with smaller operations to expect the departure of the desk phones.

Leslie Ferry, vice president of marketing at Broadsoft, expanded on the findings, telling Connected Planet:

"The survey results counter the notion that the transformation to a fully mobile workforce is still several years away, instead suggesting that enterprises must prepare today to support mobile and unified communications services across all devices and platforms.

We believe there are a number of factors fueling the shift, ranging from the consumer-grade expectations workers have for advanced communications services to a growing abundance of broadband that can support mobile unified communications (UC) services such as video calling and collaboration. The bottom line is that the time is now for enterprises to empower the workforce to benefit from mobile UC services, and for service providers to seize the opportunity to deliver them."

Also notable regarding staffing sizes was that, while BlackBerry was found to be the overall most supported mobile platform — supported by 51% of respondents, versus the iPhone's 40% support and Android's 31% — the smaller the business, the less likely IT was to support BlackBerry.

While it has a 67% prevalence in businesses with more than 1,000 employees, according to the report, support drops to 57% in businesses with 101 to 1,000 employees and 27% to those with less than 100.

Among operations supporting smartphones, the majority have employees using mobile apps for communication and collaboration — 99% in the case of iPhone users and 93% for Android and BlackBerry users, respectively.

While the BYOD, or bring your own device trend is on the rise (CP: RIM BlackBerry Mobile Fusion to support iPhones, Android), Cohen found 18% of devices to be fully employee owned and 7% to be "mostly employee owned," while fully- and mostly- company issued responses combined accounted for 61% of those polled. The trend was also more pronounced in the United States than in the United Kingdom, where the percentages of IT leaders who said they were likely to issue mobile phones to most or all of their workforces were 59% and 64%, respectively.

Finally, another theme that emerged was a move to more unified communications, which 62% of respondents said they're planning in the next year, most popularly through video conferencing (64%), instant messaging (56%) unified messaging (53%) and web/group collaboration (53%).

"The bottom line," Broadsoft's Ferry added, "is that the time is now for enterprises to empower the workforce to benefit from mobile UC services, and for service providers to seize the opportunity to deliver them."