In August, ConsafeMobility announced a partnership with Antenna, whose mobility platform will be used by Consafe to develop, manage, and deploy mobile applications. In this article, Mikael Holmqvist, business area director at ConsafeMobility, and Ken Parmelee, applications director at Antenna, share their views on which mobility trends will have the largest impact on enterprises in 2011 and beyond.
By Pernilla J. Gibson
The explosive growth of smartphones and tablets is changing, in a revolutionary way, how we communicate and access the Web in our jobs and personal lives. As a matter of fact, mobile Web adoption is growing eight times faster than the first wave of PC Internet adoption, according to Google's former CEO, Eric Schmidt. Global smartphone sales surpassed PCs for the first time in Q4 of 2010, as reported by IDC.
Listed below are seven mobility trends that will change your business in the next few years:
1. Consumer-driven development
"At work, the mobile revolution is driven by employees bringing their personal smartphones or tablets to work," says Parmelee. "[Those] accustomed to instantly available apps with intuitive and graphical interfaces are expecting the same elegant interface for mobile business applications. The Antenna Mobility Platform provides the right tools to develop graphical, easy-to-use applications that can be deployed across multiple platforms." This trend is part of the "consumerization" of information technology, which describes how new technology first emerges in the consumer market and then spreads into the business community. Gartner predicts that 90 percent of organizations will support corporate applications on personal devices by 2014 and that 80 percent of businesses will support workers using tablets by 2013.
2. Focus on the mobile professional, the "information worker"
"Historically, ConsafeMobility has focused on industry-specific mobile solutions for warehouse, field service, and logistics. Many of these applications have been custom-built onto a single device platform," explains Holmqvist. "These solutions continue to be important, but we are now seeing a strong increase in demand for mobile business applications that enable mobile professionals, or so-called information workers, to be more productive."
Mobile access to email and PIM tools is already widespread among professional workers. According to a 2010 Forrester survey, 89 percent of the organizations surveyed had either implemented wireless email or planned to implement it within the next 12 months.
Many new mobile initiatives are driven by the opportunity to improve customer service, streamline supply chain operations, and improve partner/supplier collaboration as well as to make business decision making faster and more effective. Therefore, enterprises are looking at extending their corporate systems, such as ERP and CRM, to their mobile users.
"In the last months, we have seen a steep increase in interest in apps that support company business processes and are geared toward executives," says Parmelee. "Mobile business intelligence apps that extend graphs, grids, enterprise reports, and information dashboards to a smartphone or tablet are quickly becoming popular, enabling companies to react faster and make smarter decisions."
Another area with strong growth is apps that shorten approval processes for travel requests, purchase orders, expense reports, employee work scheduling, etc. According to Parmelee, by mobilizing these apps, companies can often shorten these processes by days.
Vertical applications continue to be important, but instead of having information silos scattered throughout the organization, enterprises will be focused on integrating and linking these systems for efficient operations.
3. Customer-touching applications
Mobile apps are no longer limited to increasing productivity of the company's employees. Instead, enterprises are looking for applications that can improve customer service and increase sales.
"The iPad has opened up the market for applications that require a larger screen and a rich graphical interface. The interactive product catalogue is one of these new apps, and it allows sales reps to browse the catalogue with their customers while taking orders and notes," says Parmelee. "Companies are looking at how they can leverage existing corporate mobile apps by making them available to partners, vendors, and even customers." Another trend is to maximize the value of already-deployed smartphones and PDAs by developing new applications that focus on improving customer service.
Coca-Cola Enterprises is one of the innovators in leveraging mobile technology. Antenna's mobility platform has helped it to turn direct-store delivery workers into a high-touch sales force; they not only track deliveries on their mobile computers but also take orders directly during the customer visit.
4. Location and context
Context-based applications are another technology with large opportunity. These applications leverage information about the user—such as location, purchase history, and schedule—to present more-relevant data. As an example, GPS information can be used to optimize scheduling of pickups and service appointments.
5. Device fragmentation
The increased diversity of mobile devices—including the iPhone, the iPad, and Android and Windows Mobile devices—has enforced the need for a versatile platform that supports multiple operating systems and form factors.
"Many customers look for a solution that can help them deploy mobile apps to a wide variety of devices. The old legacy systems do not support this, and you have to rewrite the code for every platform, driving the development cost up," explains Holmqvist. "Antenna's mobility platform enables us to develop, manage, and support applications for multiple platforms in a cost-efficient way. We write the application once and can deploy it across multiple platforms, resulting in much lower development cost and faster time to market."
Gartner predicts that most enterprises will generalize their mobile efforts to include a diverse group of users and devices, instead of looking for thick-client applications for specific user bases.
6. Device management and security
Gartner predicts that 1 billion smartphones and tablets will be sold globally by 2015, forcing companies to react faster than planned to mobile security and device management.
Mobility is spreading to every corner of the enterprise, and IT is playing catch-up to regain control. Device management tools and mobile security solutions are therefore in demand.
Antenna's mobility platform has several tools that allow IT to regain control. Volt is the name of the patent-pending technology that creates a secure and private app container specifically for deploying HTML5 Web apps directly to employees' devices. The provisioning process allows for role-based application publishing, while at the same time ensuring that IT has complete control over all apps running in the Volt container on the device.
"Volt resolves the issue of employees using their personal smartphones for work," explains Parmelee. "It enables a separation of the employee's work and personal apps, while providing the enterprise-grade security and manageability that IT needs for the business apps."
7. Cloud-based apps
"Today, most of our customers use thick-client applications that are downloaded on their mobile devices. Over the next few years, I believe that the cloud will become the most common way to distribute applications," says Holmqvist.
In 2010, cloud-based services generated $9.2 billion, and Yankee Group predicts that it will grow to $22.3 billion in 2014.
The hype around mobile apps is huge, but successful implementation is not guaranteed. It is crucial to focus on the business value and to pick a solution that can scale with your future needs.
Research sources
Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, January 27, 2011 – IDC Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users, 2011 and Beyond: IT's Growing Transparency – Gartner
Forrsights Workforce Employee Survey, Q1 2011 – (Forrester)
Worldwide Mobile Enterprise Application Platform 2010-2014 Forecast and 2009 Vendors Shares, November 10, 2010 – IDC
Mobility Outlook 2011 – Yankee Group for Mobile Enterprise Magazine