Everybody is talking about mobile today. Smartphones are being bought at an alarming rate.

Mobile phones now outnumber people.

This in turn is making businesses speed up their plans when it comes to offering customers mobile services and interaction via mobile networks.

Add to this the fact that businesses are trying to enable more flexible working, which involves staff accessing corporate systems via mobiles, and you have a load of work to do in the back end IT department.

New demands such as more requests from customers, the need to engage with customers and securing the use of corporate systems for mobile users, are just some of the challenges.
Forrester did a paper on the hidden costs and disruption associated with increasing the use of mobile. Here is an article I wrote.

What I didn’t delve into in this article is the role of the IT outsourcer.

Some businesses will probably hire lots of contactors to help them through. Recent surveys of the job market have shown that businesses are looking for mobile technology skills. This is not just about understanding smartphones and mobile apps but the back-end integration.

But what about the service providers? Which companies have the most compelling mobile services?

I recently spoke to Cognizant’s UK head Sanjiv Gossain. He was explaining how mobile is a big focus for the supplier as part of its SMAC stack (social, mobile, analytics and cloud).

Businesses will increasingly need this kind of skill. Mobile and social go hand-in-hand with real-time communication with more customers. Mobile means for more data to analyse (even bigger data) that can help the business plan, and the cloud is enabling easy access to systems via mobile.

So how will companies cope with the massive changes demands on back end IT? And which suppliers will make hay in this sector?