By Stefano Buliani, Founder of Cloudbase.io
Large organizations are sometimes scared of the “go mobile” motto, this is because in their mind “mobile” involves a complete rethink of their system architecture, which will require a large amount of time and money to achieve.
Our research at cloudbase.io shows that large enterprises spend upwards of £300,000 of their IT budget to develop the integrations necessary to deploy a single mobile application. This is seriously slowing down mobile adoption in the enterprise.
Mobile is a terminal, an end-user platform used to interact with the data that already exists. It should not require architectural changes or significant development. All that’s needed is a way to push this data to the mobile devices without requiring significant development work.
Cloudbase.io helps reduce time and resources needed, often showing a 200 to 300% plus ROI Enabling a new Mobile “idea” to go from concept to deployment in the quickest possible time. This enables both independent and Enterprise developers alike to concentrate on designing the best App possible and not having to worry about how they connect their existing systems with each other and their brand new mobile application.
Cloudbase.io middleware component
At cloudbase.io we have made a point of supporting all of the smartphones available on the market. Our middleware platform creates a simple layer of restful APIs in front of any system or database deployed in your network and our client libraries allow you to query these APIs from any mobile or backend platform without missing a bit or wasting time messing around with HTTP connections and parsing.
There are countless benefits to be gained from embracing mobile. Productivity will increase for a number of reasons: People will be able to work on the move, mobile applications allow for smarter and faster work. Imagine if all you had to do to send a meter reading for your electricity was take a picture on your mobile – the app would automatically read and recognize all the numbers on the meter and send it to your account – job done in 30 seconds. Imagine capturing the mood of a customer as they consume your product with a mobile “mood” app.
Platform fragmentation is also a significant concern for the enterprise. While BYOD (Bring your own device) is all the rage these days it poses significant challenges in terms of development, security and architecture to the teams running the system.
Each mobile platform is different, requires different set of tool to manage and is not necessarily ready for enterprise-level security requirements. Additionally, when it comes to building mobile applications, each platform uses a different technology, programming language and architecture; this seriously hinders the BYOD dream. Cloudbase.io has system integration covered – development is next.
For the enterprise space a safe bet is HTML5 and JavaScript apps – by adapting the same standards created over decades in the web space we can ensure the development process happens only once for all platforms, despite Internet Explorer. This will allow the fast development and deployment of rich mobile applications.
We have been following the mobile and apps market closely over the past two years. While it may seem it is now a mature market, we see so many new possibilities appearing every day thanks to advancement in hardware technology and software that we think mobile is still in its infancy, especially in the enterprise world. The next few years are going to be critical and will define the ground rules that will govern the enterprise app market for the forthcoming future. We very much look forward to it.