Mobility now central to IT departments

Enterprise mobility is all grown up - not only are almost all of Europe's larger companies doing it, they're even taking trouble to match it up with their IT plans.

According to research from analyst house Quocirca, carried out for operator O2, mobile remote access to business systems has increased 300 per cent in the last 12 months. By the end of 2006, the un-mobilised will be the minority - with just five per cent of European businesses seeing the new year in without any mobility plans in place.

And, surprisingly, it's not just the standard mobile email projects that get businesses' hearts pounding. Companies are becoming more creative, with more than 70 per cent of them having deployed remote access to their business and admin systems. Mobile email rollouts are nevertheless increasing and have reached 21 per cent of companies.

The research also found that corporate mobility has shrugged off the scattergun deployment approach of its early years and has snuggled up with the IT crowd. Apparently, more than half of mobile deployments come out of the IT budget and a similar amount are aligning their mobility projects with the rest of their tech plans.

And, with mobility now under IT's wing, mobile-enabled companies are able to put their finger on precisely why they're bothering with the whole thing - 50 per cent claim the main motivation for going mobile is to gain competitive advantage.