Mobile E-Mail Usage To Triple By 2011 Says Report

E-mail access by mobile employees is set to triple between now and 2011, according to a report released Wednesday by U.K. Market research firm Informa Telecoms and Media. And much of that increased access will be on relatively simple devices such as standard cell phones, and not over more expensive devices such as smartphones, the study claims.

The surge will be spurred by a shift away from enterprise-managed mobile e-mail products such as Research In Motion's (RIM's) BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Instead, e-mail access will increasingly be offered by, among others, service providers such as cellular operators that deploy the same technology, according to the study.

Those providers will particularly target a group the study calls "prosumers," who are defined as mobile workers whose monthly wireless bill is partly paid for by their employer but who don't necessarily have direct mobile access to corporate e-mail.

Increasingly, that e-mail access is available on standard cell phones with built-in basic Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) a simple markup language included on many inexpensive devices.

"Because of this, it is inevitable that the prosumer segment will look to access corporate e-mail through their mobile device," Richard Jesty, a report co-author, said in a statement. "Given that solutions are now emerging which enable users to access multiple mailboxes simply from their WAP push-enabled handsets, expensive client server solutions may well find it more difficult to maintain their momentum over time."This trend will result in a tripling of mobile e-mail users by 2011 to about 212 million users worldwide, the report claims. The findings are part of Informa's report: Mobile Enterprise: Implementing Solutions for a Wireless Workforce.