This is an exciting year for enterprise mobility. As time goes on, the industry continues to hear the phrase, “Disrupt or be disrupted!” This upcoming enterprise disruption can be summed up through five key mobile insights for 2016, all of which were emphasized at this week’s IBM InterConnect 2016 in Las Vegas.

It’s important to keep in mind that these mobile insights are primarily focused on communications and workplace mobility. Additional areas to explore include the expansion into application development, open cloud technologies and human/machine learning.

Five key mobile insights: Enterprise disruption

The carrier becomes less relevant

Carriers have remained a primary touchpoint when it comes to the corporate mobile customer. After all, businesses today generally go to their wireless carrier for needs beyond call and data services. In 2016 and the years to come, the carrier will battle with new players in the market. This may include others in the device and mobile ecosystem, such as international carriers, system integrators, mobile distributors, mobile service vendors, original equipment manufacturers, enterprise mobility management vendors and others who are serving the industry.

Content is king and becomes the trigger

As you may have experienced in the consumer market, content is becoming more of a differentiator for devices than the device itself. While there are many types of devices, including tablets, smartphones, wearables and augmented reality equipment, the applications and content users access on these devices are what really disrupt the corporate environment and daily work lives.

Vendors in the ecosystem are developing strategic partnerships to further advance their existing product and service portfolios, and to gain a better position in the highly competitive enterprise marketplace. To better serve the enterprise, co-opetition is taking place. In 2016, content will be a primary leader in these strategic relationships.

Services move up the scale of importance and down market

As devices become seen more as “tools” in the workplace, the services that businesses and organizations use to protect, secure, manage, integrate and analyze them will become a higher priority. The services that are wrapped around everyday devices — such as warranty, repair, application management, security, storage, analytics and integration — will become the next phase of disruption for enterprise mobility. In addition, some services that were not realized or available for small- and medium-sized businesses will now be more readily accessible as the industry continues to embrace cloud and hybrid cloud solutions.

APIs and open development provide scale

APIs are essentially tools that provide faster development, integration and scale for the things that businesses find to be most important. These tools are becoming open, which means that developers can use the best of breed software and coding available to build and scale enterprise applications and software. The market is moving into more of a modular approach, and collaboration is making development “smarter.” These advancements all bring greater scale and adoption into the market, which serves to benefit both businesses and customers or clients.

IoT becomes plug and play, cognitive learning enhances user experience

The IoT is not a market. In actuality, it is an all-encompassing term that includes an umbrella of markets, technologies and ways of doing business. IoT solutions and applications are bringing automation and real-time information to your fingertips, and they’re allowing smart technology to make decisions and act upon that information in an immediate and more responsive manner. These enhancements play a role in a wide range of functions, including tracking assets, monitoring fluids or temperatures, controlling buildings and engaging in other operational advancements.

The industry understands that standard protocols are necessary in order to keep everything to scale. From a user experience perspective, this requires “plug and play.” After all, cognitive computing moves IoT solutions to a whole new level of intelligence. Cognitive enhancements allow enterprises to take learning to the next level by understanding and acting on the emotional, intellectual, psychological and natural fabrics of the world, systems and businesses, as well as the future of work as a whole.

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