Demand for mobile telephony services for European business is set to increase in 2005 and outstrip overall IT spending, according to research.

According to a survey conducted by analyst Quocirca, one in three respondents say they plan to increase spending in this area by 20 per cent or more, while UK specific figures suggest that mobile spending will be eight times more than that spent on other IT projects.

Some 62 per cent of UK-based companies anticipate some sort of data card rollout to employees this year, using either third-generation or GPRS networks, while 40 per cent say they will deploy Blackberry personal digital assistants (PDAs) to staff.

And the other top mobility projects set to come to fruition this year include providing either wide-scale or limited mobile access to email or other business systems, and the deployment of a variety of wireless PDAs.

Quocirca conducted the pan-European survey of 240 mobile-operator relationship managers from companies with multi-million euro turnovers on behalf of O2 in time for last week's trade event, the 3GSM World Congress 2005 in Cannes.

The researcher's UK-specific statistics came from 100 respondents working with mobile technology provision and procurement in UK companies.

Rob Bamforth, Quocirca analyst and author of the European and UK-specific reports said: 'Businesses are clearly thinking hard about the possibilities and many are already seeing substantial benefits from mobile email.

'But the real value to them will come when they combine this with access to their critical and fundamental services - the rest of IT.'