According to a new IDC report, Worldwide Mobile Worker Population 2011-2015 Forecast, we can expect the global workforce to become increasingly mobile in the coming years.

“Our forecast shows that the worldwide mobile worker population will increase from just over 1 billion in 2010 to more than 1.3 billion by 2015,” said Stacy Crook, senior research analyst for IDC’s Mobile Enterprise Research program.

The report predicts that the region that includes the United States, Canada, and Latin America will have 212.1 million mobile workers in 2015. Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) will see the largest increase in total number of mobile workers, with a jump from 601.7 million mobile workers in 2010 to 838.7 million in 2015. IDC attributes much of that increase to strong economic expansion in China and India, the two most populous nations in the world.

Although those numbers may be daunting, businesses cannot afford to ignore them. Instead they need to find ways to turn the increasingly flexible way the workforce operates into a business driver.

How? By assessing what their employees will need to take advantage of rapidly changing mobile technologies. Both enterprises and small businesses need to ensure that their mobile workers are not merely moving more than ever, but that they also have all the tools they need to access key business data and stay productive, wherever they are.

Some of the most important resources they will require to do that are mobile business apps, designed to provide the types of up-to-date data, reporting capabilities, and decision making tools they would use if they went into the same office every day.

ViziApps was launched to help businesses meet just that need. In significantly less time than it takes to build software applications using traditional methods, the ViziApps online tool enables non-programmers to develop custom, branded native apps for iOS and Android devices and web apps for any mobile device with a full browser. Because the tool provides a drag-and-drop approach that uses widgets and requires no coding, much of the technical expertise and time-consuming challenges of a software engineering project can be avoided.

Companies in a number of vertical markets are using ViziApps to develop innovative mobile apps. Employing a do-it-yourself approach that requires the same types of computer skills needed to convey information in a PowerPoint presentation or Excel spreadsheet, they are addressing the growing demand for apps that not only promote worker productivity but also engage customers and partners in new ways.