Millennials and deskless working drive enterprise mobile investment
The rise of mobile-savvy millennials playing a greater role in the workforce and deskless workers receiving more attention means enterprises are focusing more on mobile applications to drive meaningful productivity gains.
This in turn has meant investors taking a greater interest in technology companies that are aiming their products at the enterprise mobile sector.
These are among the findings of a mobile enterprise trends study released today by venture capital firm Emergence Capital. Increased focus on mobile in the enterprise has seen greater interest in the sector from investors with funding of mobile enterprise companies up nine percent in 2016 despite the overall venture funding market contracting by 11 percent.
Industry-specific mobile enterprise companies saw the greatest growth in funding in 2016. Emergence believes this signals greater relative demand for industry-focused mobile enterprise applications compared to horizontal applications. Mobile applications focused in industries such as healthcare, hospitality, and restaurant saw significant percentage increases in funding during 2016, continuing a trend that began in 2015.
Top industries include hospitality which saw a massive 1,005 percent increase in funding over 2015, healthcare which saw a 95 percent increase and restaurants, up 77 percent. Content creation and payments systems saw falling levels of investment.
2016 saw slower growth in the number of new mobile enterprise companies, up 14 percent from 2015, down from the 21 percent growth in new mobile enterprise companies seen in 2015.
Emergence predicts that 2017 will see a major technology player buy a mobile enterprise company for more than $1 billion. The report's authors note, "Realizing how far behind they are in terms of serving their customers' mobile needs, a leading technology company (ie IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP) will make a significant mobile enterprise acquisition."
More information on the study is available on the Emergence Capital website.
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