1 Billion Mobile Cloud Computing Subscribers !!

Yes. That's what I said! A recent EDL Consulting article cites the rising popularity of smartphones and other advanced mobile devices as the driving force behind a skyrocketing mobile cloud computing market.

According to ABI Research, the current figure for mobile cloud computing subscribers worldwide in 2008 was 42.8 million, representing 1.1 percent of all mobile subscribers. The 2014 figure of 998 million will represent almost 19 percent of all mobile subscribers. They also predicted that business productivity applications will take the lead in mobile cloud computing applications, including collaborative document sharing, scheduling, and sales force automation.

"The major platform-as-a-service providers - Force.com, Google and Amazon - are expected to start "aggressively" marketing their mobile capabilities starting in 2010. An earlier study from ABI Research reported that mobile cloud computing will generate annual revenues of more than $20 billion by 2014."

With that recent bit of news, let's look back at an August Government Computer News article:

• The U.S. Postal Service has equipped nearly 9,500 senior and operational managers with BlackBerrys, giving them access to real-time information and alerts they need to make decisions about services USPS provides to the public.
• The Census Bureau has deployed the Microsoft Windows Mobile operating system on 140,000 handheld personal digital assistants that census workers use during the decennial head count.
• Users of Army Knowledge Online (AKO) will be able to access and send sensitive information through a secure mobile platform using Windows Mobile devices.

And.......

• President Barack Obama, for whom security is paramount, kept his BlackBerry after taking office — but not before it was locked down with strong encryption and security provisions to protect e-mail and communications with his inner circle.

As my friend James Urquhart put it in his recent Wisdom of the Clouds post, enterprise cloud computing has indeed come of age.

"[O]ne has to wonder as application architectures adjust to cloud computing, how much longer they are going to be tightly coupled to data center architectures. At what point will it no longer be advantageous for application owners to define infrastructure in terms of servers, storage, and security devices?"

The timing of secure cloud computing technologies and secure mobile devices couldn't have been better.

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