IT departments at businesses in a wide variety of verticals are finding themselves ill-equipped to meet the demand for mobile apps due to skills gaps, legacy infrastructure and limited budgets and resources.

Those are the findings from a new global survey of IT managers and developers by Kony and 451 Research, which found that over half of those surveyed were planning to deploy 10 or more enterprise mobile apps in the next two years, but were struggling to cope with fragmented technology, and were forced to turn to third parties to meet the business demand for mobile apps.

“There is strong demand for new mobile apps, and companies are broadening their focus beyond core processes and application silos; however, enterprises are still very much in the early stages when it comes to mobile app strategies,” said Chris Marsh, principal analyst for 451 Research.

“IT is still in the drivers seat when it comes to both the bulk of internal mobile app development, technology procurement and project management, although line of business want input and greater collaboration. Line of business is also starting to bring a great amount of funding support to the discussion.”

Customer engagement, employee productivity and marketing & services apps were highly sought after by companies in every vertical, as well as CRM apps within sales-focused enterprises or departments.

“The global market for enterprise mobility is expected to grow from $72bn (£45.8bn) to $284bn by 2019, nearly quadrupling in size,” said Dave Shirk, president of products and marketing at Kony. “Companies need to be prepared to meet this demand for mobile business solutions with proper alignment between lines of business, IT developers and IT management, to effectively manage and lead enterprise mobility projects.”