Smartphones driving BYOD growth in Asia: IDC

Market for Bring-Your-Own-Devices (BYOD) to work will continue to witness strong growth this year in the Asia Pacific region, driven by burgeoning smartphone sales and tablets in the consumer segment, research firm IDC said.

BYOD refers to employees purchasing devices with their funds and employers neither subsidising nor supporting the devices' hardware and software.

According to IDC, mobile devices utilised under the BYOD model accounted for 22.5 per cent of all consumer smartphone sales, followed by notebook PCs (11.7 per cent) and tablets (4.9 per cent) shipped in 2013.

IDC expects that close to 155 million consumer smartphones will be used in the BYOD model across the region in 2014, a year-on-year growth of 40.4 per cent.

Tablet BYOD will grow to nearly four million units (y-o-y growth of 62.7 per cent), while notebook PC is expected to see a steep decline as the PC industry slows down and BYOD users migrate to other BYOD platforms.

IDC expects just 3.1 million units of consumer notebook PC will be utilised under the BYOD model, a year-on-year decline of 20 per cent.

The momentum of BYOD has definitely increased over the past 12 month and it will continue the upward swing in 2014 and well into 2015, IDC Asia Pacific Research Manager Enterprise Mobility Ian Song said.

"With the user experience of mobile devices improving, end users can start to perform more complex task on those devices. In addition, the price of device has also dropped to a level where increased proliferation becomes possible," Song added.

He said enterprises across the region are also becoming more open to the idea of BYOD as a way to drive mobility in their organisations and that BYOD is being driven primarily by the usage of personally-owned smartphones in the enterprise.

"BYOD smartphone utilisation will peak around 2016 to 2017 and tablets will peak around 2017 - 2018," Song added.

However, IDC does not anticipate the BYOD growth to last as it is a compromise between users and the enterprise.

"While BYOD has a capability to streamline some of the internal operations, personally owned devices will not be able to drive core business functions without compromising security and management," it said.