Individuals armed with the latest Apple and Samsung smartphones are redefining big businesses as employees as well as consumers.

Tim Harris, managing director of BT Global Services (BTGS) in Southeast Asia, used to focus on convincing senior executive officers at MNCs that his firm's networked IT solutions were cost-effective and safe. Over the last couple of years, however, Harris' clients have started asking for something more: corporate IT networks that can support their employees' personal smartphones, laptops and tablet computers.

"We are beginning to see consumer devices lead the enterprise market. We are seeing increasing sophistication of the consumer device," Harris tells The Edge Singapore. To deal with changing client demands, BTGS has over the past year rolled out BT Mobility Lifecycle Management — a portfolio of solutions that allows its clients to securely and remotely manage the personal mobile devices of employees. The solution includes mobile device management, an enterprise app store and expense management. And, Harris is certain it is going to be a hit.

When the age of desktop computers dawned 30 years ago, companies effectively controlled the devices and software their employees used to get their work done. Even with the advent of mobile Internet access and increasingly affordable laptops and smartphones through the past decade, the distinction between work tools and personal devices remained quite stark initially. While an individual might have had a personal preference for Apple's MacBook or a Motorola Razr mobile phone, their work devices were often IBM's ThinkPad and Research In Motion's BlackBerry.

Apple's introduction of the first iPhone in 2007 and the proliferation of apps that followed seemed to change everything. Yuen Kuan Moon, CEO of Singapore Telecommunications' Singapore consumer business, recalls that when he first heard about the iPhone, he was very excited to bring it to Singapore. "Because we were very interested and pursued it aggressively, we managed to convince [Apple]," Yuen says. "We actually believed that it was going to be a very iconic device because we looked back at how Apple had introduced new devices. It had that cool factor. Phones prior to that didn't have that same effect."

A slew of smartphone makers jumped on the bandwagon, leveraging Google's Android platform. As an open-source platform, Android was available to any device maker and spurred some strong price competition that pushed smartphones into the hands of consumers faster than ever. Over the last two years, Samsung Electronics has emerged the victor in the Android space, and even outpaced Apple on some counts.

Now, smartphone users have developed strong preferences for the device they want to use, and the smartphones themselves are powerfu enough to be the primary computing device for many people. According to numbers from research firm Gartner, global smartphone sales rose 46.9% in 3Q2012 even as total mobile phone sales fell 3.1%. Juniper Research says some 650 million smartphones are likely to have shipped this year and nearly one person in 10 worldwide is likely to have bought a smartphone.

Those figures are redefining big businesses across the globe. For starters, makers of PCs and laptops are being forced to change. It was not so long ago, for instance, that Chinese PC maker Lenovo Group looked like it was going to dominate the PC industry. Indeed, in 3Q2012, it surpassed long-time market leader Hewlett-Packard in PC shipments, according to Gartner. It also reported quarterly earnings of US$162 million ($198 million), beating analyst estimates. Yet, the 12.6% growth it posted was the slowest in more than two years.

And, things are likely to get worse. In 4Q2011, global shipments of smartphones exceeded shipments of PCs — a trend that industry analysts say is set to continue this year. Now, Lenovo is investing heavily in tablets and smartphones, where it will once more have to prove its mettle, this time against the likes of Apple and Samsung.

Content distributors too are facing new challenges from the proliferation of smartphones. John Medeiros, chief policy officer of broadcasting association CASBAA, says: "Viewers are increasingly consuming TV content in new and non-traditional ways, prompted by increasing technology ownership and the proliferation of Internet-connected devices." Without the ability to watch legal content on their smartphones, these consumers are turning to illegal sources of content.

New opportunities
Meanwhile, just about every business that scrambled to develop an online platform a decade ago now has to reorient its offerings to accommodate the smaller screens of mobile devices. Yet, by doing so early, these companies might have a first-mover advantage of sorts in providing new services that are becoming possible with smartphones.

For instance, Oversea-Chinese Banking Corp was among the first banks to release mobile banking applications for the local market. Its application includes a unique feature that lets customers scan barcodes on their bills with their phones, then pay those bills online — no data entry required. "Customer demand for our mobile banking applications has been overwhelming," says Pranav Seth, head of e-business at OCBC Bank. "The customer base has doubled, and transaction value has seen an increase of more than 120% on a year-on-year basis since 2010. Based on the strong take-up in mobile banking, we expect this channel to become an important tool in engaging customers. We see mobile banking as a core part of our multi-channel strategy designed around our customers' needs and preferences."

For SingTel, Singapore's largest listed company, smartphones have been truly revolutionary. Consumers today use their phones for so much more than just communications. And that has led SingTel to initiate a transformation into becoming much more than a communications company. Besides selling its customers data plans to support Internet access via their smartphones, it is also developing an entire ecosystem of new services.

One of SingTel's first big successes was a music download application called AMPed. The application won an award for "Best Mobile Music Service" at the GSMA's Asia Mobile Awards in 2009. Since then, the company has released a host of other applications that are on both Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store. "Phones have gone from addressing communication needs to productivity needs, entertainment needs and others," Yuen says. "This is what our new Digital Life business group is working on. We are definitely going into spaces that are non-telecommunications."

Yuen says SingTel is able to sell apps and services because of the availability of big app stores, which gives the company scale. Before the popularity of the iPhone and Android phones, many phone manufacturers and telcos worked on their own apps or app stores but the market was too fragmented to make app adoption a success. He adds: "Before, we were all working on our own solutions with a walled-garden approach. The ecosystem that was created with smartphones gave us the scale to offer our services to all our consumers."

Elsewhere, new opportunities are being created for EMC, which provides storage systems, software, infrastructure and services to enterprises. Through a unit called Greenplum, it offers data warehousing and analytics solutions to help companies optimise and analyse large amounts of data — commonly referred to as big data analytics. Eric Goh, managing director of EMC in Singapore, explains that smartphones have made it easier for companies to gather accurate and comprehensive data about consumers. Likewise, it is also easier for consumers to get real-time information that is relevant to them from the data analytics engines.

What can this data be used for? One of its customers, US company Silver Spring Networks, sells smart grid network solutions. Using Greenplum's solutions, Silver Spring Networks gives utility companies the ability to analyse the usage of their energy grids. The utility companies can also offer their consumers mobile apps that allow tracking of energy usage in real time. Consumers can schedule the use of appliances at non-peak hours when power is more affordable.

What next?
What other new services will become possible with smartphones and other mobile devices? Will the smartphone eventually evolve to the point of obsolescence?

Yuen says one big emerging trend that SingTel sees is video — which consumers are increasingly watching on its mobile broadband networks. The company is dealing with this trend by upgrading its networks and improving network provisioning. He has no doubt that, as smartphones grow more powerful, backed by the Internet and capabilities of cloud computing, new consumer trends will emerge.

He stresses, however, that companies should not become too focused on the technologies and devices for their own sake. "Technology may change, devices may change. But the needs of the consumer will always be there," he says. As long as companies can figure out how to stay ahead of the curve in serving consumer needs, technology will be just a way for them to do so better, he adds.

BTGS' Harris sees the needs of his enterprise customers changing too as they respond to the demands of their own customers and employees. That could mean not only significant challenges in the years ahead, but also a big opportunity to change the status quo and grow.

This story first appeared in The Edge Singapore weekly edition of Dec 31, 2012-Jan 4, 2013.