Business decision makers across a variety of companies and industries often have a lot of the same frustrations when it comes to deploying mobile projects. Enterprise IT managers typically can list off common mistakes they've made, learned from, and vowed never to repeat again while bringing mobile apps to market. These slides review the top 10 mobile traps others have fallen into to help avoid them on your own mobile path.
In this presentation you'll learn:
-What are the top 10 "gotchas" experienced by mobile professionals
-What lessons have others learned the hard way in deploying mobile apps in the enterprise
-Examples of successful mobile app deployments and how they minimized the potential risk for costly mistakes
On the positive side of the ledger, the enterprise mobility market matured (or exploded) in 2012. It came out of infancy and entered adolescence in certain respects. IT got much more involved – or was forced to get involved – which is great for Antenna as our core value has always resonated with the more technology-minded professionalsNative became sexy again, and enthusiasm for mobile web/HTML5/etc. became much more realistic as a result of a few tech juggernauts (e.g., Facebook) falling short of user expectations with their mobile web appsBut most importantly – what REALLY ignited this market – was the BYOD phenomenon. Unfortunately, Antenna and others of our MADP ilk were the immediate benefactors of this market tipping point. Instead, MDM players like A/W, Mobile Iron, Good, and others started printing money as IT groups began buying licenses en masse in a very knee-jerk manner for fear they would lose control (or possibly their jobs) if they didn’t get in front of this trend that had a life of its own.One the negative side of the ledger, while it’s hard to prove … anecdotally … the global economic crisis has certainly had in impact of buying patterns and investments in transformative technologies.But, what really affected us and caught us somewhat flat-footed was the wide use, adoption, implementation of free/open development toolsets. It put a spotlight on the fact that developers hold the keys in many respects and prefer to use the likes of Sencha, Jquery Mobile, PhoneGap to get to market quickly and inexpensively.
So without the sales pitch I’ll just leave you with this clear summary of what AMPchroma does and invite you to visit our web site to learn more.
I’m talking again about enterprise mobility. It’s not quite as simple as I made it out to be a minute ago.Designing one app is hard work. Figuring out how to build the app and deploy the app and manage the app and secure the content is all hard work. But it’s all required for enterprise mobile apps.The issue is that after the app has shipped, you’re not done. Not only are you not done with that first app, because you need to iterate, but most enterprises are building many more than just one app. A survey by McKinsey late last year found that most CIOs said they expect to deploy more than TWO DOZEN mobility apps in the next 2 years.So what? Well, if you’re going to do something dozens of times, it probably makes sense to invest in some sort of system, or platform, to streamline that process and automate that process and make it easier to repeat. But this isn’t a sales pitch…
I’m talking again about enterprise mobility. It’s not quite as simple as I made it out to be a minute ago.Designing one app is hard work. Figuring out how to build the app and deploy the app and manage the app and secure the content is all hard work. But it’s all required for enterprise mobile apps.The issue is that after the app has shipped, you’re not done. Not only are you not done with that first app, because you need to iterate, but most enterprises are building many more than just one app. A survey by McKinsey late last year found that most CIOs said they expect to deploy more than TWO DOZEN mobility apps in the next 2 years.So what? Well, if you’re going to do something dozens of times, it probably makes sense to invest in some sort of system, or platform, to streamline that process and automate that process and make it easier to repeat. But this isn’t a sales pitch…
Android is a seriously fragmented operating system, and it's only getting more fragmented. OpenSignal, which makes an app that measures network performance, produced the following chart on the state of Android based on its users. It used the last 682,000 downloads of its app to produce the chart.It says there are 11,868 distinct Android devices, up from 3,997 Android devices last year. While this sounds like a mess for developers, Google has 1 million apps in its Google Play app store for Android. That's more than Apple has for its App Store. So, the fragmentation isn't turning off developers.Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-androids-insane-fragmentation-2013-7#ixzz2gO7NqASS
But before we go into too much detail, let’s take a step back and remember why these middleware technologies exist at all.The reason mobile middleware is so valuable, especially in the enterprise for what we call B2E or business-to-employee apps, is that the middleware provides an integration layer between the new mobile apps and the legacy enterprise systems. Things like CRM, ERP, HR Management, Workflow Assignments, Customer Service, just the whole scope of enterprise business software. Now anyone familiar with a three-tier client-server architecture won’t be surprised that it exists for mobile as well. But in the mobile space it’s actually even more important to have that middle tier because legacy enterprise systems tend to use communications protocols like SOAP or XML-RPC or things that are even older. And most of those protocols are what we call “chatty” or “verbose” or just heavy, meaning that along with requested data comes a whole bunch of overhead like headers, footers, and request/response information. And there can be dozens of these protocols, even in the same enterprise.But mobile devices treat bandwidth as more of scarce commodity and they’ve tended to standardize on lightweight protocols like REST and JSON bundles. Remember, for mobile devices connectivity can be sporadic and inconsistent, so it’s a good idea to transfer the least amount of data possible, and that’s what these lightweight protocols do.So the middleware tier is really useful for converting all the data from these legacy systems and protocols into common, modern, lightweight protocols. And at the same time, it provides a layer of security between backend enterprise systems and all these new mobile devices that are suddenly connected to the network.So, there’s a very good reason for mobile middleware.
Right! They won’t do it.Even when they are required to implement certain device-level security that’s MANDATED by the company, they probably forget or are too lazy or maybe even too BUSY to do it.According to a survey by Ponemon Research & Websense, only 6% of IT department heads believe that their employees actually comply with mandatory device-level security policies.So why is BYOS not a term you hear about? Because there’s no such thing.
Which raises the question, why do I keep putting this thing in the middle called a “MOBILE PLATFORM?”Well, a mobile platform can help IT Managers to administer and control the security of enterprise mobile apps. A mobile platform provides a central management point for mobile access to enterprise applications and data. by centralizing that access, it’s easier to monitor and manage. And ultimately it delivers greater control to the mobile architect.
If you’ve ever ridden on an Amtrak train you know that until last year the ticketing process was pretty tedious and conductors were still manually hole-punching tickets, collecting tickets for each route, and mailing them to a revenue center in Texas for data entry. It used to take Amtrak almost a week to recognize revenue for each train route. To fix that, Amtrak worked in with Antenna, Deloitte Digital and AT&T to develop a mobile eTicketing app for the iPhone that lets conductors to scan tickets in real-time (either via printed tickets or directly from a device) – automatically “lifting” riders into Amtrak’s systems. The device is also fitted with a credit card sled that enables conductors to sell tickets, modify existing reservations, or offer refunds – right on the train. Now everything is happening in real time. Not only is the data better and more reliable, but it’s available immediately.Amtrak had to build this, there was no app already in the app store for railway ticketing.Eaton’s PowerSource App is an interactive, multimedia iPad app that has helped Eaton shorten the sales cycle from days to minutes. The app replaces 15 to 20, 500-page printed product catalogs and contains detailed information on more than 200,000 hydraulic products that Eaton sales representatives and distributors can access anytime and anywhere, online or offline. And it’s really an amazing app because you can take these complicated looking hydraulic products and parts and rotate them in 3D to see if it’s exactly the right thing. You’d be hard pressed to do that with a catalog.But Eaton had to build this app, there was no app already in the app store for hydraulic parts visualization and inventory.Anyway, you probably get the idea. From FEMA to Xerox to Coke, companies are building mission-critical apps for mobile devices. And there’s not already an app for any of them.
Number one is not at all obvious. Mobile first does not mean “mobile only.”“Mobile first” is kind of new age mantra for some developers to remind themselves that many applications need to be mobile friendly. You hear it a lot when people talk about designing new web sites or even new business processes. But it’s important to remember that the world hasn’t gone 100% mobile just yet. And a new mobile app has to be, in many cases, landline friendly.I think the best example of this is the Amtrak app. I take the train between New York and Boston almost every week. And I notice that more and more people are using their mobile device to show their ticket. And the conductors are now 100% proficient with iPhone scanners. So it’s “mobile first,” right?Well, no. Not really. I don’t buy my ticket from the app, I typically buy my ticket on the Amtrak web site. But when I do that the ticket shows up in my app within seconds. And if anything ever went wrong, or I lost my phone, or I forgot to buy a ticket online, I could always go to one of the kiosks in the station and print my ticket out, or buy a new one. So it’s mobile friendly, yes, but it’s not mobile only. Amtrak realizes that mobile is just one channel for passengers to buy and store tickets. So they designed their system to integrate mobile perfectly, but they didn’t discard all the other ways they service their passengers. It’ll be interesting to watch over the next several years to see if businesses like Amtrak can ever truly phase out things like paper tickets and kiosks in favor of mobile devices and web.