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Archive for the ‘Cloud Based Middleware’ Category

Trends in the Smartphone Industry and the Effect on Enterprise Mobility

Emerging developments in the Smartphone industry are expected to bring about new trends for enterprise mobility management, with formerly popular business Smartphone options being replaced by new products from Google and Apple. RIMM’s Blackberry offering has been the only mobile offering taken seriously for sometime by corporate IT. However, the “bring your own device” philosophy  continues to be adopted by the enterprise due to major cost savings, the consumerization of corporate IT, and mobile business applications. Mobile enterprise applications will need to evolve based on these factors, while provide a rich native user experience to drive employee adoption of enterprise mobility.

A recent report from institutional securities firm Piper Jaffray predicts Android Smartphones to occupy nearly half of the market share during the next five years, with an additional 20 to 30 percent market share taken up by Apple’s iPhone. The firm made its prediction based upon the recent surge in growth for Android Smartphones, as the study shows Google’s current 14.9 percent of market share in 2010 will grow to 23.2 percent by 2012. The prediction for Google overshadows the iPhone’s expected progress, which the report forecasts will increase from 15.9 percent to 17.6 percent during the same time period.

Naturally, the research leaves little room for the long-time dominant Research In Motion and Nokia to continue to provide a significant amount of enterprise s Smartphones. As a result, the report speculates that either company could eventually adopt the Android system in order to stay relevant, and may even move to Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.

“Over time, we do not see the benefit of RIM and Nokia continuing to push proprietary software that can’t compete with the market and eventually expect one or both to capitulate and move to utilizing third-party software,” the report explains.

For mobile application development, the trends toward user familiarity of mobile devices will bring pre-packaged mobile applications to the forefront. Organizations will need to adapt to the needs of their end-users, in this case their employees. The rapid deployment of cloud based pre-packaged mobile applications, along with the scalability needed by the enterprise, makes these pre-packaged mobile solutions a preferable alternative to the resource intensive alternative to writing custom mobile applications in-house. As leaders in enterprise mobility, Smartsoft Mobile Solutions is positioned to supply the enterprise with these pre-packaged mobile applications, thus allowing businesses to focus on their core competencies and optimize resources.

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Posted in Apple, Application Development, B2B Mobile, Cloud Based Middleware, Devices, Enterprise Mobility, Mashups, Windows | 4 Comments »

New Carrier-Imposed Bandwidth Restrictions and the Impact on the Modern Mobile Enterprise

It is no secret that both business and consumers are using mobile devices. In fact, enterprise mobility is forecasted to grow by 70% in 2011. It is also no secret that mobile device users are actually using applications. The average iPad user has over 60 apps on their device. With carriers doing away with “all you can eat” data plans, what impact will this have on enterprise mobility?

Recently, Virgin Mobilejoined the list of mobile service providers who implement restrictions on wireless data bandwidth. Virgin Mobile notified customers with its unlimited mobile data plans that there would be restrictions on bandwidth once the customer exceeds 5 Gigabits of download bandwidth in a given month. This leaves Sprint as the only wireless carrier that doesn’t currently restrict unlimited data services.

Restrictions such as this will impact enterprise mobility plans in two ways. First, they will cause a rise in the cost of providing mobile applications to workers. Second, they will limit the ability of the enterprise to innovate both for internal and customer-facing applications. Services that include video could become crippled if bandwidth isn’t available. Applications such as video conferencing, video streaming, and application sharing will become increasingly difficult (and expensive) to deliver to mobile workers.

To overcome these restrictions, developers of  mobile enterprise applications for functions such as human capital management, work order management, or inventory management must make sure to build thin apps that only pull new data to the device, data that is absolutely mission critical. Enterprises will need to adopt “smart middleware” that can provision devises not only to the user level, but the application as well. The middleware will need to detect the delta between the data on the users’ device and the actionable mission critical information stored in the back office system. The business need for enterprise mobility will force companies to look for mobile solutions providers that have the capabilities to evolve with the rapidly changing landscape that is mobility. As leaders in enterprise mobility, Smartsoft Mobile Solutions not only offers prepackaged enterprise applications built thin, but the middleware that can reduce bandwidth consumption of a mobile workforce.

For More Information Check Out:

The Battle for the Mobile Wallet is On!

Data Usage Among Android Users is Much Greater than Than of iPhone Users

Tablets: Taking the Business World by Storm

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Posted in Application Development, B2B Mobile, Cloud Based Middleware, Devices, Enterprise Mobility, SAP, Tablets | 3 Comments »

How will Prepackaged Mobile Enterprise Applications and Cloud Hosting Impact Your Business?

The move to cloud-based mobile middleware for the enterprise is rapidly gaining momentum. Mobile cloud applications move computing power and data storage away from mobile phones and into the cloud, bringing apps and mobile computing not just to Smartphone users but to a wide spectrum of mobile subscribers. Add this trend to pre-packaged mobile enterprise applications such as inventory management or human capital management and you will begin to see the future of the modern mobile enterprise. 

The dominant force in mobile apps is likely to be cloud computing, according to ABI Research in its recent study Mobile Cloud Computing.  Cloud technologies will also make mobile apps more sophisticated and offered to a broader audience of mobile subscribers, ABI Research stated in its report. The research firm further forecasts that the number of mobile cloud computing subscribers worldwide will rise from 42.8 million in 2008, (approximately 1.1 percent of all mobile subscribers) to more than 998 million in 2014 (nearly 19 percent).

One area the report explores is cloud-based, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) companies, and why this is important to mobile applications. PaaS encompasses various services for software development and deployment, for instance those offered by Google Checkout, Amazon Web Services, and Force.com.

Another report, this one from Juniper Research, predicts a strong future for mobile cloud computing, finding that the number of enterprise customers using cloud-based mobile apps will grow to 130 million by 2014. With this growth, the need for a top-to-bottom enterprise mobility solution that is highly scalable, flexible, and intuitive to the end user (your workforce) will become critical.

When evaluating an enterprise mobility solution, a company should focus on the following:

  • Affordability (SaaS model and PayGo will dictate this) 
  • Scalability (cloud-based mobile middleware or PaaS)
  • Flexibility (can your developers write apps and build connectors on the platform rapidly)
  • Deployment (are the apps pre-packaged and is there an open source mentality of the provider)

Using these three drivers and tailoring the strategy specifically to the mobile needs of the individual enterprise will help facilitate the success of the mobile enterprise campaign. As leaders in enterprise mobility, Smartsoft Mobile Solutions stays at the forefront of the mobile cloud computing revolution.

For More Info Check Out:

Cloud Based Mobile Middleware: The Future of the Modern Mobile Enterprise

Smartsoft Mobile’s Top Four Enterprise Mobility Predictions of 2011

Leadership in Enterprise Mobility: Five Tips to Improve Your Business Efficiency in the New Year

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Posted in Application Development, B2B Mobile, Cloud Based Middleware, Enterprise Mobility, Solution Delivery | 7 Comments »

Leaders in Enterprise Mobility on Mashups: How Valuable Can They Be?

A mashup is defined as the pulling of data from multiple back office systems or other sources and combining that data to create an entirely new and useful subset of previously existing data. Mashups are currently done by connecting to back-office ERP’s via data mapping and combining the required data manually via amashupand presenting that data to employees via a web or mobile application. The power and value of a mashup is not seen by a company until mashups can be generated quickly for multiple users and purposes via a mashup engine. The mashup engine is designed through the data mapping of multiple back office systems, allowing the tool to pull data via web service calls to the back-office, all running through middleware. The administrators can create mashups rapidly through the mashup engine via a GUI that allows for a “drop and drag” interface and eliminates the need for writing code when creating a mashup.

 Smartsoft Mobile Solutions has used mashups in mobile applications for our customers. CRM Mobile Mashup For an example of the value created by a mashup, let’s look at a CRM iPad application. Customer data is stored inside SAP, and that data contains information like customer name, address, order history, etc. Presenting that data on in an organized manner on a mobile device is great, but when you pull in a mapping overlay with real time traffic flows from a leading provider, as well as the customer’s social media and web offerings, and mash all that data up, you now have a very useful tool. Sales reps can keep up with their customer’s marketing messaging, look at order status and history, anticipate client needs, contact the client by phone or in person, and efficiently manage their travel time to client locations.

As leaders in enterprise mobility, Smartsoft Mobile Solutions looks to incorporate mashups whenever necessary into mobile enterprise applications. As you can imagine, the possibilities are endless for mashup creation due to the sheer amount of data and data sources, and the value to the enterprise is limitless.

For More Info Check Out:

Data Usage Among Android Users Much Higher Than iPhone Users

Leaders in Enterprise Mobility: The Current State of Enterprise Mobility

Best Practices: Mobile Project Implementation

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Posted in Application Development, B2B Mobile, Cloud Based Middleware, Enterprise Mobility, Mashups, SAP, Tablets | 1 Comment »

Cloud-Based Mobile Middleware: The Future of the Modern Mobile Enterprise

Cloud-based computing has been the buzz of the industry and the sweetheart of Wall Street for the past several years. Currently, cloud computing is set to take enterprise mobility to the next level. Cloud-based mobile middleware allows for B2E communications between workers via a mobile device and one or more back-office systems, presenting mission critical data as useful information for the increased productivity of the workforce. The combined consumer and enterprise market for cloud-based mobile applications is expected to rise 88% between 2009 and 2014, according to a study from Juniper Research. This report indicates that the total market for cloud-based mobile applications will rise from a little more than $400 million in 2009 to nearly $9.5 billion by 2014. 

Key drivers of mobile cloud computing growth include the following elements:

  • Scalability for large enterprise mobility projects: The cloud offers enterprises with the ability to deploy mobile applications and rapidly scale deployment of key/mission critical mobile applications at a cost that is greatly reduced by cloud data storage. 
  • SAAS licensing model with further reduce costs: Approximately 75% of this “cloud” market is represented by enterprise users, and Juniper expects revenues in both user segments to be primarily derived from time-based subscriptions. Enterprise subscriptions will allow for business stakeholders to implement mobile applications and projects with reduced up-front costs, so an enterprise is not be locked into an expensive Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms (MEAP).
  • Launch of HTML5: The new HTML5 revision to the core markup language of the Worldwide Web, which is partially available to the public, offers improved data caching and reduces load demands, which will make cloud-based mobile connectivity a means of improving access in locales with poor coverage.
  • Superior processing power:As individual Smartphone apps become larger and more plentiful, the superior processing power of the cloud will allow apps to be downloaded as thin clients, with most processing performed on the cloud rather than the headset.
  • Cloud-enabled enterprise mobility: The cloud enables collaborative apps to be available 24/7, at any location. This freedom for the collaboration of mobile application developers will generate mobile enterprise applications with robust features, tailored to specific business processes and flows.
  • End of “All you can eat” data plans:With carriers moving away from the buffet data plans, enterprise applications that require large data pulls with multiple calls to enterprise web services will become increasingly unviable due to data usage costs.  The need to develop “thin” mobile applications that only pull data needed by the worker on a mobile device will further drive cloud computing growth. The heavy processing lift for data will be in the cloud, and only a small amount of data will be pushed to the mobile device using a “smart sync” of the mobile application and “Machine to Machine” (M2M) communications.
  •  Rapid adoption of mobile devices by employees:Mobile devices, whether it be Smartphones or Tablets, will increasingly be seen as a business necessity, not just a luxury. Equipping these consumer grade mobile devices with enterprise centric mobile applications will be a key to creating a competitive advantage. The diverse needs of the enterprise workforce will require rapid mobile application development and powerful processing of data in the cloud. Deployment of these mobile applications will use an app store approach when necessary; however, internal enterprise software release processes will still dominate most mobile enterprise application releases.

Cloud-based mobile middleware will enable small to medium size businesses the ability to have mobile enterprise offerings similar to large Fortune 500 companies. As this technology rapidly expands to all industries, look for pre-packaged mobile applications to handle standard and homogeneous business processes such as inventory inquiry, while custom development of unique mobile applications that focus on complex business processes and flows will be performed either by internal software development or mobile solutions specialists. As the leader in enterprise mobility, Smartsoft Mobile Solutions currently offers a cloud-based mobile middleware that achieves key corporate enterprise mobility objectives with a licensed SASS based model. We at Smartsoft Mobile Solutions look forward to being at the forefront of cloud-based mobile middleware, generating a rapid return on investment for our customers.

For More Information Check Out:

Data Usage Among Android Users is Much Greater Than That of  iPhone Users

Leaders in Enterprise Mobility: The Current State of Enterprise Mobility

Best Practices: How Should a Retailer Select a Strategic Mobile Partner

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Posted in Application Development, B2B Mobile, B2C Mobile, Cloud Based Middleware, Devices, Enterprise Mobility, SAP, Tablets | 3 Comments »

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