Report forecasts one billion mobile cloud users by 2014

San Francisco, Calif. A recently published report forecasts that the number of mobile cloud computing subscribers will increase exponentially over the next five years – from 42.8 million subscribers in 2008 to 998 million in 2014.

“From 2008 through 2010, subscriber numbers will be driven by location-enabled services, particularly navigation and map applications,” explained senior ABI Research analyst Mark Beccue.

“A total of 60 percent of the mobile Cloud application subscribers worldwide will use an application enabled by location during these years. By 2014, mobile cloud computing will become the leading mobile application development and deployment strategy, displacing today’s native and downloadable mobile applications.”

Beccue explained that cloud applications would help bring new options to a wide range of mobile subscribers, including collaborative document sharing, scheduling and sales force management apps.

Beccue added that some or all of the major PaaS platforms — such as Google, Amazon AWS, and Force.com – will begin to “agressively” market their mobile capabilities beginning in 2010.