High-profile launches from players such as Amazon, Google
and Apple are expected to galvanize the growing market for consumer cloud
mobility services, generating revenues reaching almost $6.5 billion per annum
by 2016, according to Juniper Research.
While initial consumer deployments in the cloud were
focused primarily on the social networking space, music and video
storage/acquisition services such as Amazon’s Cloud Drive and the forthcoming
Apple iCloud are expected to gain rapid traction with substantial adoption over
both smartphones and tablets.
Both services are geared to migrating end users’ music
collections onto the cloud as well as enabling the purchase and storage of
additional tracks, while Amazon also offers a cloud-based delivery mechanism
with its Cloud Player.
However, mobile social media services are also expected
to benefit as providers increasingly seek to develop revenue streams based
around virtual goods: the report highlighted the success of Zynga’s Farmville,
and suggested that growth in this sector should receive a particularly strong
boost as consumer tablet adoption accelerates.
While the report claimed that the increasingly
competitive storage sector meant that the provision of consumer storage in
isolation was unlikely to generate substantial returns in the longer term, it
identified bundled storage and security solutions as a key growth area.
“The handset is now the repository in many cases the
sole repository for data such as photographs, videos, address books, games and
music; when the device is lost or stolen, that data may be irreplaceable.
Hence, the facility to offer remote back-up becomes increasingly
attractive,” said Windsor Holden, report author.
Other findings from the report include: Enterprises need
to develop policies to cover the use of consumer smart devices in the
workplace, Cloud offers network operators the opportunity to develop
double-sided revenues from PaaS solutions for enterprise and consumer markets.
By Telecomlead.com Team
editor@telecomlead.com
