As collaborative applications become ever more important for enterprise, a new report finds that the number of enterprise customers using mobile cloud-based applications will rise to more than 130 million by 2014, facilitated by platform as a service (PaaS) deployments from key players such as Google and Microsoft.

Juniper Research said Tuesday that the market for connected enterprise apps had benefitted from the success of Apple's iPhone and App Store.

It said that this was reflected both by a marked increase in both the number of enterprise apps available to end-users and also in the fact that such apps were themselves becoming far more attractive given the wide-ranging enhancements to smartphone user interfaces in the wake of the iPhone launch.

A cloud-based ecosystem for enterprise apps will be attractive both for developers and enterprises alike, the author Windsor Holden said.

For developers, cloud opens up a far wider potential audience for their products; for enterprise customers, outsourcing application management to a remote third-party, costed on a scalable, pay-per-use basis, offers far more flexibility combined with a significant reduction in capital expenditure.

Iphone Apple inc. Cloud computing Microsoft