As More Workers Take Their Smartphones to Work, Business Use of Mobile Apps Rises Sharply

Already there are 132 million people around the world who use their smartphones at work, and that number is forecast to grow by nearly a third this year to 174 million.

By 2017, there will be 328 million workers bringing their own smartphones to work, according to the latest quarterly report from Good Technology.

The study also found that companies are adopting mobile apps for use in their business at an increasing rate.

In its quarterly report, the company said that enterprise app activations were up 54 percent from the prior quarter, an acceleration from the 42 percent growth rate between the second and third quarters.

The iPhone gained ground, accounting for 54 percent of new devices activated in the quarter, buoyed by the release of the iPhone 5s. Android use was 26 percent, down a bit from the prior quarter but still up three percentage points from a year ago. Windows Phone, meanwhile, accounted for just 1 percent of device activations on Good servers, flat from the second and third quarters.

As for what folks are doing on those mobile devices, document editing is still the most popular business task being done on mobile devices, though cloud storage and business intelligence apps are on the rise.

“What we get most excited about are the kinds of applications enterprises are building themselves,” Good Technology CEO Christy Wyatt said in an interview. “We saw even more aggressive growth in Q4.”

Of course, the biggest development in the mobile enterprise space of late was VMware’s announcement that it will spend $1.5 billion to acquire AirWatch, a rival in the mobile device management space.

That, Wyatt said, puts a smile on everyone’s face.

“They are a company much smaller than Good,” Wyatt said. “It says a lot about the opportunity in this space.”

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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