According to a new research report from the analyst firm Berg Insight, the global market for mobile location platforms will show steady growth in the next few years.
Total location platform revenues are expected to grow at a CAGR of nearly 11.5 percent between 2013 and 2020, reaching € 470 million at the end of the forecast period. Much of the growth is expected to come from the emerging commercial indoor location segment, while the market for location platforms deployed by mobile operators is maturing. Annual revenues for GMLC/SMLC and A-GNSS servers, passive location platforms, as well as middleware deployed by mobile operators are forecasted to grow from € 200 million in 2013 to € 300 million in 2020.
André Malm, Senior Analyst, Berg Insight, said:
“Mobile operators deploy new location platforms and upgrade existing systems mainly to comply with public safety and lawful intercept regulations that are gradually being introduced worldwide.”
These platforms can also enable commercial location-based services (LBS). He adds that a growing number of mobile operators are also deploying passive location methods that enable mass location of handsets without overloading the network. Mobile operators are starting to explore opportunities to extract more value from location data gathered from their networks in areas such as network optimisation, customer experience management, mobile marketing and analytics. However, most consumer and enterprise LBS now use location data obtained directly from GPS or Wi-Fi in handsets and will therefore have a limited impact on location platform market growth.
A broad set of actors are developing indoor location technologies that enable use-cases ranging from emergency call location to commercial applications like navigation, customer engagement and analytics.
“The commercial indoor location market is still at a relatively early stage and has not yet reached mass adoption,” said Mr. Malm.
“The market has suffered from a lack of cross-platform solutions and confusion among venue owners over which platforms and technologies to use”. Understanding of the value of indoor location and analytics services is now growing among retailers and venue owners, at the same time as uncertainty over which technologies to deploy decreases.
“Remaining challenges to solve include how to motivate end-users to download the venue owner’s app, as well as how to bring customer value that encourages continued use of the app on a regular basis”, concluded Mr Malm.