With a majority of large Australian businesses either on the way to implementing an enterprise mobility strategy or having one already in place, a recent survey says that attention is being turned to the next phase of extracting the most from the mobile environment: Apps.

The survey, conducted by Vanson Bourne and sponsored by CA Technologies, surveyed 1,300 senior IT decision makers across 21 countries, and included 75 IT decision makers in Australia from organisations with revenues of AU$100 million or more.

Of the Australian respondents to the survey, 65 percent have an enterprise mobility strategy in place or plan to, while 42 percent said that they believe they could do more in the mobility space. In line with such moves, spending on mobility from the IT department is slated to increase by 54 percent over the next three years, while spending from other business lines on mobility will increase even more, coming in at 60 percent.

The survey found that Australian businesses are changing their focus from device deployments to app creation: 66 percent of local respondents said that mobile apps for customers and employees is their main enterprise priority; BYOD and internal device management came in at 34 percent.

The biggest challenge in app development is creating apps for different platforms simultaneously, which came in at 41 percent, followed by gaining support from departmental stakeholders, ot 37 percent, and security and privacy concerns, at 33 percent.

Driving the enterprise mobility push has been increased demand from customers, and a need to improve the customer experience, the survey found. The results said that organisations that successfully implemented a mobility strategy have seen 19 to 31 percent improvement in employee retention, revenue, time to market, customer experience, employee productivity, and costs. Australia has seen a 30 percent increase in employee retention, which was the highest across the Asia-Pacific region, as was the 48 percent of local businesses that changed the organisation hierarchy to cater for mobile roles and responsibilities.

“Unless organisations adopt effective and integrated mobile device management technology, the mobile devices