How Many Solutions Does it Take to Implement Enterprise Mobility?

How many different solutions do you need in order to implement an enterprise quality mobile solution?  I think this is a worthy question.  In years past MEAP (mobile enterprise application platform) and MADP (mobile application development platform) vendors tried to cover all of your needs, but the market has determined this is not an acceptable model going forward.  Companies are just not comfortable putting all their eggs in one basket and betting the mobile farm on an unprofitable VC backed mobility vendor.  Enterprise mobility is just too strategic.  Even when companies have standardized most of their internal business solutions on a major ERP vendor, they want to keep their options open.  SAP understands this and has worked to make their SAP Mobile Platform environment play nice with other vendors and toolkits.

Given that market manifesto, companies must now pick and choose their own variety of mobile solutions, platforms and toolkits.  The first question, again, is how many solutions do you need?  I am going to suggest at least one more than you may have thought.  Several vendors including Aternity (www.Aternity.com) and B2M Solutions (http://www.b2m-solutions.com/) propose that you must understand your business process and systems' performance first, second your mobile app performance, and thirdly your workers' performance (KPIs) in the field.  How many of you have recognized this solution category in the past?  Not many I think.  This is an area generally overlooked in most mobility projects.

Think about this scenario - Your team develops the world's best mobile app, however, it sucks and nobody will use it!  How could that be?  The business process, back office systems, APIs and security environments are too slow to support the needs of the mobile app and by extension the mobile user.  That is a critical problem.  It would have been nice to measure the performance of those required systems and processes before you invested in the development of the mobile app. Many IT environments were not designed with mobility in mind.  Today, major work must be done in many enterprises to support the new digital and mobile realities.

I am recommending that enterprises first measure the performance of the business process and relevant systems before they start developing the mobile app.  Once the performance is deemed satisfactory, then develop the mobile app and measure its performance.  Isolate performance issues at each step of the way.

Once your business processes, systems and mobile app performances are all deemed satisfactory, then seek to start measuring workforce productivity and KPIs via the mobile apps.  This data can be used to better understand "patterns of life" and "patterns of work" and optimization efforts implemented.

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Kevin Benedict

Writer, Speaker, Editor

Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation, EBA, Center for the Future of Work Cognizant

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Kevin Benedict's What's New in HTML5 - Week of October 28, 2012

Quantas Freight has launched its new HTML5-based mobile app and mobile site for smartphones.  Read Original Content

Phineas Barnes, in the article “HTML5 Is the Real Loser In The iPhone Maps Fiasco” in Business Insider, believes that the native app experience is much better than web apps and HTML5 comes out the loser.  Read Original Content

QNX Software Systems has announced the HTML SDK, an extension of the open source BlackBerry WebWorks framework, specially optimized for automotive environments.  Read Original Content

Apple has purchased Particle, an HTML5 web and web app design firm that has done HTML5 work for Google, Motorola, Amazon, Yahoo, Sony, and Apple.  Read Original Content

Christian Heilmann of Mozilla believes developers shouldn’t abandon HTML5 - even with bumps along the road, as the benefits of HTML5 will ultimately prove worthwhile.  Read Original Content

Mobile social game company Gree has launched a new open-source tool for creating Unity - and HTML5-based smartphone apps with Flash content.  Read Original Content

Developer Eran Zinman of Conduit shares his “real life experience” with “Native, HTML5, and Hybrid Mobile App Development”.  Read Original Content

 The DevCon5 HTML5 Developers and Design Conference will be held November 27-29, 2012 in San Francisco and will feature leading HTML5 developers, engineers and evangelists.  For conference information, go to http://www.html5report.com/conference/california/.  Read Original Content

InfoWorld highlights “7 Apps Making the Most of HTML5” illustrating how to make the most of HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS.  Read Original Content

Oracle has released its Application Development Framework Mobile, an HTML5 and Java-based framework to enable developers to build, deploy and extend enterprise applications for mobile environments from a single code base.  Read Original Content

Cookeatshare.com is developing a free HTML5-based site for iOS and Android devices.  Read Original Content

Mike James describes how to utilize HTML5’s Media Capture API when creating web apps in this article in i-programmer.  Read Original Content

Microsoft‘s HTML 5-based Office Web Apps are now live and available through SkyDrive and Outlook.com.  The new web apps have been fine-tuned to work properly with the final version of Internet Explorer 10, Windows 8 and iOS 6.  Read Original Content

According to LongTail Video’s “State of HTML5 Video”, 79 percent of the market can now play HTML5 video.  Read Original Content

Jeff Corbin of theIRapp outlines why he feels HTML5 misses the mark in mobile investor relations strategies in his whitepaper “Investor Relations (IR) Apps: Native or HTML5?”  Read Original Content

“Mobile applications and HTML5” are number two on Gartner’s list of the top ten strategic technology trends for 2013, and one of the assumptions by year end 2014 is that HTML5 will be the “mainstream enterprise app vehicle”.  Read Original Content

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

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Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Kevin Benedict's What's New in HTML5 - Week of October 21, 2012

I gave a presentation on SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) at a large high tech conference this week in Scottsdale, AZ.  During my presentation I surveyed the audience by a show of hands and asked how many were planning to pre-dominantly develop using HTML5 (or HTML5 hybrid apps), and how many were planning to use native.  About two thirds were planning to use HTML5 for their app development projects.

Also last week, I interviewed Tony Kueh, SAP's Head of Mobile Platform Solutions and Strategies about HTML5 vendors and SAP's open strategy for working with them in this video interview.  It is interesting who SAP picked to work with around HTML5 development.

Now for the news...

HTML5 is an option publishers should consider for delivering content to mobile devices.  Giles Phillips of Brightcove believes that HTML5 has “definitely created more flexibility for publishers and has helped make responsive web design a viable option for publishers with a blended content mix”.  Read Original Content

Microsoft and developers of the physics puzzle game Contre Jour have teamed up to utilize HTML5 to create the game for the Web in what Microsoft calls one of the most ambitious uses of HTML5 to date.  Read Original Content

Quark has launched an upgrade to its AppStudio program for creating and publishing mobile apps.  The new version is HTML5-based, providing features including searchable, selectable text, tagging, bookmarking, commenting, and multifaceted social media interaction.  Read Original Content

AOL’s new HTML5-based version of Games.com is cross-platform, available on PC’s, smartphones and tablets and provides access to more than 5000 titles.  Read OriginalContent

The selection of mobile development tools has never been richer and more affordable as it is today.  Mel Beckman provides information and advice for developers not sure whether to go with native apps, HTML5 web apps, or a hybrid approach in this article in PC Advisor.  Read Original Content

HTML5 has the potential for growth in areas such as graphics rendering and Web services protocol and it ultimately helps developers and content providers remove the "chains" from being tied to native platform owners.  Read Original Content

Dolphin has launched a new companion app for its Android browser and the company claims that “Dolphin Jetpack” brings 5-10 times faster HTML5 rendering performance than the stock Android browser.  Read Original Content

With the growing popularity of mobile websites, HTML5 rich media banners have become an excellent way for advertisers to communicate with their target audiences. “With the increased demand for rich media, HTML5 is transforming the landscape of mobile advertising and advertisers are starting to see the successes.”  Read OriginalContent

Sony’s newly redesigned PlayStation Store was built in HTML5 to provide flexibility for the company to seamlessly add new features and capabilities.  Read Original Content

Opera Software has launched Opera Mobile 12.1 for Android with additional HTML5 features including HTML5 Drag and Drop and the HTML5 Clipboard API.  Read Original Content

Software FX has announced the release and availability of jChartFX, a free collection of charts and graphs for business data visualization and analysis for HTML5, jQuery and JavaScript developers.  Read Original Content

SAP’s mobile HTML5 apps program for developers has produced a number of apps which are “clearly focused on what the biggest enterprises and businesses need to get work done on a mobile scale”.  Read Original Content

Phone Arena conducted an iPhone 5 vs. Samsung Galaxy S3 comparison test to see which device performs better with HTML5.  Read Original Content

Lori MacVittie of F5 explores the question “Is HTML5 the Answer to Mobile's VDI Challenge?”  ReadOriginal Content

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

What's New in HTML5 - Week of April 30, 2012

I am in Scotland this week conducting workshops on mobile strategies.  I met with a large company with multiple enterprise mobility projects to connect back office ERPs and HR apps to mobile applications.  They have already determined they will be using HTML5 as their preferred mobile app development environment.  They already have experienced web developers so extending the skills of these developers into mobility makes perfect sense to them.

The meteoric rise of the number of apps for iOS and Android devices may present too much clutter for our networks and attention spans.  “There is no need for an “app” that is simply a shell to deliver Web content. In fact, many of these narrow-purpose apps can and should be Web-based applications (particularly built on HTML5) delivered through the browser.”  Read original content

Appcelerator has released the new version of its Titanium platform.  Titanium 2.0 includes support for HTML5 mobile web apps.  Read original content

Bluega’s pieOS provides a touchscreen user interface developed using HTML5 and usable across all mobile devices.  Read original con ten

Human resources enterprise solution provider Workday has released its newest update, Workday 16, delivering new features and enhancements including HTML5 for mobile.  Read original content and another article here.

TapEdition has launched HTML5 magazine app building capabilities allowing users to develop HTML5 based magazine apps compatible with all smartphone and tablet devices. Read original conten

Responsive Web Design is made possible by HTML5 and CSS3 and is already “having incredible impact on Web design and mobile marketing”.   Ron Jacobs, president of Jacobs & Clevenger, presents a case for HTML5 over mobile apps.  Read original content

Shivank Arya describes several non-UI features of HTML5 which can be used in almost all web applications.  The article covers features such as new web storage mechanisms, Web Workers allowing multiple threads, and offline availability of applications.  Read original content

CNET’s new mobile site melds native apps and mobile web, taking cues from mobile apps while allowing seamless navigation when clicking on a CNET link without installing an app.  Read original content

Mozilla has announced it will launch its HTML5-based mobile platform, Boot to Gecko, sometime between late 2012 and early 2013.  Read original content

LongTail Video’s latest State of HTML5 Video report reveals that close to 74 percent of the browser market now supports HTML5, and full-screen HTML5 video is now available from a majority of web browsers.  Read original content

Adobe’s Creative Suite 6 will include a new application, Adobe Muse, which will allow users to create HTML5-powered web sites without writing any code.  Read original content

Google is closing down its mobile web app for Google Talk, forcing users who wish to continue using Google Talk to use the native app.  Read original content

Magento has released HTML5 enhancements to its Enterprise and Community Edition platforms, enabling “mobile web capabilities integrated deep into the platform”.  Read original content

The W3C has posted an update on progress of the HTML5 specifications, and the HTML Working Group Chairs have developed a draft stabilization plan with a timeline for advancing the HTML5 specifications to W3C Recommendation.  Read original content

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Kevin Benedict, Independent Mobile Industry Analyst, Consultant and SAP Mentor Alumnus

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Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility analyst, consultant and blogger. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.