Jason Armitage, Yankee Group: 2012 Mobility Predictions: A Year of Living Dangerously

December 8, 2011

In its new report "2012 Mobility Predictions: A Year of Living Dangerously," Yankee Group looks ahead to 2012 and sees the mobile industry preparing for a year of uncertainty and global transition. As the fiscal balance tips to new economies, mobile players must adapt quickly or disappear. In 2012, mobile workers and consumers will embrace tablets, mobile content, mobile video and personal cloud services at unprecedented levels. At the infrastructure level, operators will feel the squeeze and look to new policy solutions to help them monetize all-IP networks. Amid these shifts, even Internet players must prepare for a year of change that will create new challengers for industry leadership.

"The world is in transition and in the year ahead, mobile will be both the protagonist and subject of this instability," said Jason Armitage, senior analyst and co-author of the report. "The winners in this evolving landscape will be those players that can capitalize on the global mobile gold rush and treat each user as a unique customer."

Yankee Group's 2012 mobility predictions are:

1. Asia will beat out both Europe and the U.S. in tablet sales. Asia-Pacific will see almost 39 million tablet sales next year.
2. RIM will fend off Nokia/Microsoft to stay in the smartphone top 3. RIM smartphones will continue to account for more than 1 in 4 smartphones in U.S. enterprises and will remain in double digits with U.S. smartphone owners.
3. Android will make it a consumerization triumvirate in the enterprise. It will go from a third-place position to an even share alongside iPhone and BlackBerry.
4. Emerging markets operators will invest more in HSPA+ than LTE. They will embrace the chance to get headline speeds for a software upgrade, eschewing LTE for now.
5. IP-based Diameter signaling will take control. Spending in the segment will more than double, growing from U.S.$22 million to U.S.$45 million.
6. Despite vendor hype, cloud RAN will remain a wisp. Its requirement for extensive dark fiber runs will limit it to only a few very large cities.
7. Personal clouds will hit prosumers' radar. Nearly 1 in 5 professionals with three or more devices will adopt a personal cloud service for online storage, backup and synching.
8. Video consumption on tablets will more than double in the first six months. Tablets will rule as an explosion of video gets delivered to non-TV devices.
9. HTML5 will cross the enterprise tipping point. Most enterprises will choose HTML5 technologies over native coding for customer-facing mobile applications.
10. More than half of mobile malware signatures will target Android. This will be a marked increase from the 40 percent targeting Android today.
11. North American enterprises will buy into 3G/4G M2M. By 2013, 75 percent of new M2M deployments in North America will use 3G or 4G.
12. Multiple uber-TSMs will emerge--and do battle. As stakeholders vie to own mobile payments, at least one entity--and perhaps many--will emerge to act as a neutral third party or uber-Trusted Service Manager (TSM).
13. At least one U.S. prepaid operator will beat out postpaids on Net Promoter Score (NPS). Straight Talk will surpass postpaid U.S. providers by at least 12 basis points on this critical customer experience metric.
14. Economic woes will contribute to an additional 7 million Europeans switching providers. Average monthly churn will increase to 2.4 percent by year's end.