SPECIAL REPORT Mobile devices: A market
The IT giants are imploding in a struggle to get the most out of mobile, so how can resellers capitalise on this confusion? Adam Oxford explains.
I
f you want to capitalise on growth in the mobile sector over the next 12 months you’ve got to help your customers make sense of what’s going on. Here’s the background. PC sales are down 19 per cent across Europe in Q2 alone, and long established business models are crumbling at a staggering speed. Mobile and tablet sales are on the up. Smartphones are unstoppable, and tablets are proving themselves perfectly suited to the core business purposes of unified communications and social media integration. And with their highly graphical interfaces, they make compelling sales tools too.
In case you haven’t been watching, here’s a brief recap of recent events in the IT world. Apple overtook Exxon
Mobil to become (briefly) the most valuable company in the world. However, the firm is suing most of its rivals for various forms of patent infringement. They managed to get a temporary Europe- wide ban on shipments of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and are seeking similar embargoes on the Korean firm’s highly successful smartphones. This is despite the fact that Samsung is Apple’s major manufacturing partner, producing both the processor that powers the iPad 2 and the screen that makes it look so nice.
Google, meanwhile, has been outmanoeuvred by a consortium of once deadly rivals including Apple, Microsoft, Sony and RIM in its bid to own the patent portfolio built up by the now defunct Nortel. The old guard are closing ranks and trying to sue the nouveau riche upstart back into a search engine, demanding exorbitant licenses for every device that uses the Android operating system. Then there’s systems giant
Oracle, which is close to extracting upwards of $6 billion from Google because of copyright breaches relating to its Java language. Google’s surprise counter was to buy Motorola’s phone and tablet division.
And what of Microsoft? If things carry on this way your kids may never even have heard of them. Windows Phone 7 has failed to reverse Microsoft’s mobile fortunes, and it’s now looking to next year’s Windows 8 - a one- size-fits all operating system which will work, crucially, on ARM-powered phones and tablets. The default new look for Windows 8 will be a tablet-style interface full of HTML5 apps, which means Windows is in the process of giving up windows.
Asus Eee Pad
All this is about jostling for position in the mobile space. Here’s why: According to Ofcom’s August 2011 telecoms report, 27 per cent of the UK population now owns a smartphone, and smartphones make up half of all handset sales. 32 per cent of people use their phone to access the Internet. At the end of 2010 there were 33.1 million 3G subscriptions, compared to 29.7 million analogue fixed lines. The number of UK business fixed lines fell by 10 per cent. The situation is just as dramatic for traditional IT sales. PC shipments are tanking, according to Gartner. It
Chris Barrow
I’m astounded by the speed with which BYOD has taken off
reckons sales of laptops fell by 20 per cent in Q2 across Western Europe. That includes a massive 53 per cent drop in netbook sales. What are people buying? iPads and tablets. Apple saw a 136 per cent increase in global sales of the iPad to 10.7 million in Q2 alone.
Time to invest
Now is the time to invest in a strategy that involves tablets and mobile technology. But where do you put your money when even HP can’t get it right? In June it tried out the tablet waters with its webOS-powered TouchPad. By mid-August, the world’s largest computer manufacturer by units sold announced it was getting out of the business altogether, leaving just Dell and Apple
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68 COMMS DEALER OCTOBER 2011
as the only two firms outside of Asia producing PCs and laptops en masse. As head of Products and Technology at Arrow Mobile Communications, Greg Eaton has plenty of experience making value judgements about new devices. He says that resellers have a competitive advantage over the networks when it comes to getting new devices to market, because they can move faster than the networks and don’t have to carry large amounts of stock.
But manufacturers aren’t helping the channel to support much beyond the obvious Apple option. “The classic example of that was the BlackBerry PlayBook,” Eaton says. “That was launched without an email
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