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

Community Guest Blog post by By Ben Lee

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.