Reckon you could run your business from your smartphone? Perhaps you couldn’t right now, but by the end of next year you’ll probably be able to!

Just as SaaS rose to fame, mobile apps for business usage are doing too. There’ve always been so-called “productivity apps” that have mass appeal, such as note-makers and advanced calendars and more recently we’ve seen the introduction of apps with slightly less encompassing appeal, like document scanners and file management systems. But mobiles apps are now taking leaps from these and are really focusing in on specific industries and tasks.

Vertical apps are those which are only relevant to a certain sector, the healthcare industry has been a widely cited adopter of such technology, with ehealth becoming a term in itself. Medical professionals around the world are replacing complex machinery and reams of paperwork with mobile applications that can be taken to their patient. Other industries are catching up though; as a particularly mobile profession, it makes sense that a construction firm would build an iOS app specifically for iPads, to eliminate much of the paperwork required on site. The same goes for estate agents, some of whom can now use an app on the go to view the status of transactions.

Horizontal apps, which bring existing services together on a mobile platform, are also gaining popularity. Many new start-ups are emerging that can combine functions already available on a variety of platfoms, seamlessly into one place. For example an app which has the capability to search through all files stored on the cloud, whether that be email, Evernote or Dropbox etc.

A recent study by IT research firm Garnter has led to predictions that CRM systems will be largely available via mobile apps in the very near future too. They estimate there will be more than 1,200 mobile CRM apps available from app stores in 2014, compared to last year’s figure of just over 200 – that’s a growth of around 600 per cent.

“Many organisations want to extend their customer service to the mobile platform market. However, the reality is that not all good applications make a good mobile application,” said Johan Jacobs, research director at Gartner.

Such shifts in the availability of mobile apps for business will not only make working easier when you cannot be at your desk, but it should also give marketers more tools to market to their own customers via mobile platforms.