When I was managing a mobile applications company a few years ago, our entire market was SMEs (small to medium sized enterprises). In over half the mobile application development projects that we worked on there was NO existing backend database. Companies would contact us and say they needed the following:
- A mobile application for a specific business process, inspection project, or unique business model.
- They needed a database to store the data they collected in the field.
- They needed mobile middleware to synchronize the data from the mobile devices to the database
- Web access to the database so people around the company could easily view the data.
- Reports on the data collected in the field.
Sometimes it is easy to focus only on the largest companies that use ERPs, but it is important to recognize that the majority of companies in the world do not use big ERPs and these companies are often service companies doing work in the field. These SMEs do not often have their own mobile middleware. They want as much simplicity as possible.
