Type of Article: MacTech Blog

M2M connectivity will be embedded in more than 2 billion devices across nine key industries by 2018, but it will be cellular that will bring the bulk of the value and the connectivity revenues, according to ABI Research.

There are many trends simultaneously affecting the market for mobile device semiconductors. Two have been the shift towards multicore application processors and the addition of x86 and MIPS to what used to be purely an ARM play. Two newer trends are the addition of heterogeneous processing functionality and 64-bit processors for mobile devices, according to ABI Research.

Mobile authentication and encryption services for enterprises are growing dynamically with the saturation of cloud-based applications and BYOD trends, according to ABI Research (www.abiresearch.com).

Organizations are looking to maximize the benefits of these technologies while maintaining a level of security that satisfies compliance and the protection of corporate resources, according to the research group. These need to be further balanced against flexibility and manageability; without these guarantees, even the most secure solutions are useless.

The use of cloud computing is growing, and by 2016 this growth will increase to become the bulk of new IT spending, according to Gartner, Inc. (www.gartner.com). 2016 will be a defining year for cloud as private cloud begins to give way to hybrid cloud, and nearly half of large enterprises will have hybrid cloud deployments by the end of 2017, the research group says.

Strategy Analytics (www.strategyanalytics.com) has lowered its outlook for NFC-based mobile payments to reflect the slow pace at which operators are pushing NFC payment services, limited NFC payment deployments by handset makers, and the continued slow adoption of contactless payments by retailers.

The research group estimates that 115 million NFC handset owners will spend just over US$48 billion using their NFC phones by 2017. Although that’s a large amount, it represents a drop in the ocean of the multi-trillion dollar global retail sector.