By 2017, 50% of Enterprises Will Require Employees to Supply Their Own Computing, Communications Devices

By 2017, possibly 50 percent of enterprises will require employees to provide their own computing or communications tools, Gartner now predicts.

Some 38 percent of companies expect to stop providing devices to workers by 2016, according to a global survey of CIOs by Gartner.

Those forecasts, if borne out, indicate that an inflection point in enterprise computing already has happened.

"BYOD strategies are the most radical change to the economics and the culture of client computing in business in decades," said David Willis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.

The changes come for a myriad of reasons, including the power of consumer devices, the preference for consumer devices, the growing prevalence of cloud computing, the ubiquity of high-speed access, the ability to offload mobile traffic to the fixed network and the advantages to enterprises of changing information technology costs.

Gartner defines a BYOD strategy as an alternative strategy that allows employees, business partners and other users to use a personally selected and purchased client device to execute enterprise applications and access data. It typically spans smart phones and tablets, but the strategy may also be used for PCs. It may or may not include a subsidy.

Though enabled by cloud computing, the switch to user-supplied devices also will further drive cloud app adoption, since that is one way enterprises can enforce policies and allow access without the traditional support labor.

While BYOD is occurring in companies and governments of all sizes, it is most prevalent in midsize and large organizations ($500 million to $5 billion in revenue, with 2,500 to 5,000 employees). BYOD also permits smaller companies to go mobile without a huge device and service investment.

Adoption varies widely across the globe. Companies in the United States are twice as likely to allow BYOD as those in Europe, where BYOD has the lowest adoption of all the regions.

In contrast, employees in India, China and Brazil are most likely to be using a personal device, typically a standard mobile phone, at work.

Today, roughly half of BYOD programs provide a partial reimbursement, and full reimbursement for all costs will become rare. Gartner believes that coupling the effect of mass market adoption with the steady declines in carrier fees, employers will gradually reduce their subsidies and as the number of workers using mobile devices expands, those who receive no subsidy whatsoever will grow.

As you might well expect, the BYOD change will affect enterprise spending on all manner of computing devices. The impact on enterprise IT spending also should be positive for enterprises but negative for existing suppliers of enterprise premises systems and gear.