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| Webalo's Peter Price |
This article is written by guest blogger Peter Price, the co-founder and CEO of
Webalo, a cloud-based SaaS platform that provides an enterprise-to-mobile model.
This past week, I met with a customer who had taken
the time to visit us at our Los Angeles headquarters. In our cloud-based
world of enterprise mobility, this is pretty rare since face-time with
customers is not required for them to get the business benefits of our service.
So it was a real pleasure to have an opportunity to talk face-to-face.
The part of the conversation that interested me the most was
when they described the IT/User reality of their business.
Their IT reality is a collection of in-house-developed
applications (mixed together with some packaged ISV applications) and the
challenge of operating and maintaining this primarily legacy environment in the
context of today’s real-time, global, business operations.
Their business reality involves mobile users who require access to the enterprise
information that IT manages in these applications. BlackBerry devices, iPhones,
iPads, and Android phones are their users’ devices of choice and, today, those
users demand the ability to do the things they want to do on whatever device
they use. No surprises here because their reality is also that
of 98% of businesses. Enterprises face the challenge of connecting a legacy IT world with today’s
BYOD reality, which is different.
It requires a flexible, rapid, scalable way to provide mobile access to
enterprise applications and data, and without this, IT will find itself in an
ongoing pattern of creating a major IT development project for every mobile app
required and that approach is neither scalable nor sustainable.
I recently read Gartner’s new Magic Quadrant for Mobile
Application Development Platforms and was struck by how different the
requirements are for today's market, tackling our customers BYOD mobile application
challenges, rather than those of that old mobile application development paradigm.
As Gartner pointed out in its Magic Quadrant report, the programmer toolkits
required for the old paradigm fall into three categories; native toolkits, web
toolkits, or cross-platform toolkits. All of which are hard-core software
development platforms.
Of course, these MADP tools (as Eric Lai of SAP/Sybase recently blogged) require the very best of software developer expertise – experts who typically earn $240,000 or more a year – and they are required for that operational type of mobility application. These projects need to support field
service personnel, logistics, and similar remote business processes (think
FedEx delivery drivers), and often merit the very high cost of mobile
application development because the business requirements justify the
substantial resources needed to utilize traditional, complex, MADPs.
Today, however, the number of mobile-capable employees is
expanding exponentially, growing beyond this subset of field employees to encompass more
than 80% of the workforce. This new mobile user paradigm needs different types of
enterprise interactivity, and there are very different mobile development
requirements necessary to deliver them in this all-mobile-all-the-time/BYOD
reality. Speed and affordability are not the least of them.
I’d describe these requirements as follows:
- A great user
experience on the device and a simple IT experience in delivering mobile apps
to users.
- Users will
demand the ability to do the things they want to do, so your “app development”
model has to scale – it has to enable the high volume production of apps.
- Given this
high volume requirement, speed and cost become paramount, so “same-day”
response rates and app costs at pennies per app are also prerequisites.
- Apps that
support existing business processes found in existing enterprise applications.
- In large
corporations, this all has to be enabled at the departmental level – IT cannot
be burdened with all the responsibility because their to-do list is already
full. This means the model cannot require $240,000 a year specialists; instead,
departmental IT administrators, and perhaps even “citizen developers”, need to
be able to use their skills to meet their departments’ enterprise-to-mobile app
requirements.
- In mid-size
and small businesses, this new approach is the only valid one because the MADP world
is just, well, mad and a cost-prohibitive, IT skills-intensive, non-starter for
all SMBs.
- Secure,
robust, scalable, and available goes without saying but provided in a way that
utilizes the cloud for multi-tenant accessibility while also supporting behind
the firewall deployment if security requirements demand it.
When 98% of businesses need to satisfy
the vast range of mobile application requirements of their entire,
all-mobile-all-the-time workforce, MADness doesn’t do it. So Gartner, where’s the Magic
Quadrant for the 98% of businesses facing today’s BYOD reality, like the
company that visited us last week? We’re looking forward to reading it.
Do you agree or disagree with Peter? I would like to hear your thoughts.
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| Join me on this webinar, Wednesday May 30th! |
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Kevin Benedict, Mobile Industry Analyst, Mobile Strategy Consultant and SAP Mentor Alumnus
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
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.
