Harnessing the Power of the Mobile Cloud

WHITE PAPER

Harnessing
the Power
of the
Mobile Cloud

Published November 2010
Antenna Software, Inc.
111 Town Square Place
Jersey City, New Jersey 07310

Copyright© 2010 by Antenna Software, Inc. All right reserved.
Antenna Software, Inc., 111 Town Square Place, Jersey City, New Jersey 07310
All products and product names mentioned in this publication are trademarks 1
or registeredphone 888.723.2832 web antennasoftware.com
trademarks of their respective companies.

Table of contents

Introduction 3

The Mobile Cloud 3

Time to Market 4

Ease of Deployment 5

Reliability 6

Scalability 6

Support 7

Cost of Ownership 8

The Antenna Mobile Cloud 8

Conclusion 9

Antenna Software, Inc., 111 Town Square Place, Jersey City, New Jersey 07310 2
phone 888.723.2832 web antennasoftware.com

introduction
Mobile technology has been around for decades, but only within the past couple of
years has mobility become truly pervasive. Whether for work or play, mobile devices are “By 2015, more than 240 million
fast becoming the dominant means by which we interact with information, applications business customers will be leverag-
and people. ing cloud computing services
through mobile devices, driving
Cloud computing has also been around for decades—the concept of sharing comput- revenues of $5.2 billion”
ing resources can be traced back to the days of mainframes. Adoption of cloud — ABI Research
technology, too, has surged to unprecedented levels over the past few years as
Internet technologies continue to mature and get more powerful.

In fact, the research firm Gartner has identified both cloud computing and mobile
applications as the top two strategic technologies for 2011--defined as technologies
with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Both
technology trends are driven primarily by the consumer’s unquenchable thirst for
real-time connectivity to information and with each other. But, both trends also have
important impacts on the long-term strategy of corporate IT. This whitepaper discusses
the convergence of mobility and cloud computing and discusses six strategic advan-
tages by harnessing the power of the Mobile Cloud for driving competitive differentia-
tion and delivering happiness to employees and customers.

The Mobile Cloud “We are seeing an acceleration of
Before we dive in, you might be asking, “What is a Mobile Cloud?” adoption of cloud computing and
cloud services among enterprises …
A Mobile Cloud is a set of hosted services, typically powered by a mobile IT managers are thinking strategi-
enterprise application platform (MEAP), that shields the complexities of cally about cloud service deploy-
mobility from the enterprise and enables them to focus instead on quickly and ments; more-progressive enterpris-
easily delivering transformational mobile apps to customers, employees and es are thinking through what their IT
partners. operations will look like in a world of
increasing cloud service leverage.”
What’s so complex about mobility? Well, getting data from a backend system to a
— Ben Pring, research vice
mobile device may sound easy, but it’s a lot trickier than you think. There’s the matter of
president at Gartner, “Forecast:
extricating the data from a heterogeneous backend environment, communicating
Public Cloud Services, Worldwide
seamlessly across potentially more than 400 wireless networks across the globe, and
and Regions, Industry Sectors,
finally presenting data to thousands of mobile device types – with different form factors.
2009-2014”
And don’t forget about guaranteeing transactions in an occasionally connected
environment, dealing with multiple potential security points-of-failure, optimizing
performance and responsiveness, managing network latency, and many more complex
but necessary capabilities of an enterprise-grade mobile deployment. The Mobile Cloud
aims to unburden corporate IT with all these intricacies and leave them with the more
strategic objective of building mobile apps that transform the business.

Additionally, cloud computing spreads the cost of infrastructure and support resources
among customers that use it, and the Mobile Cloud is no different. By offloading the


burden of building and administering a comprehensive, end-to-end mobile infrastruc-
ture, enterprises can realize faster time-to-market and greater return on investment for
their apps by simply plugging into the Mobile Cloud.

When you add it all up, there are six significant advantages for choosing the Mobile
Cloud as the foundation for a comprehensive and long-term enterprise mobility
strategy:

1. Time to market – ability to quickly build and deploy mobile apps to adapt to
ever-changing device technology and user needs
2. Ease of deployment – ability to easily publish and distribute mobile apps with
greater flexibility and tighter control
3. Reliability – ability to run mobile apps with minimal service disruption for all users
4. Scalability – ability to extend mobile apps to millions of users and transactions
across the globe
5. Support – ability to rely on systems and people to optimize operations and mobile
app usage
6. Cost of ownership – ability to reduce burden on internal IT resources and shift
them to more strategic objectives

Time to Market
Speed is crucial in this new era of mobility. Device manufacturers are churning out new
and more powerful devices faster and faster. This is great for the end users, but for
enterprises and developers, the fragmentation becomes a nightmare to manage. The
days of writing an app for one or two devices and expecting it to last for three to five
years are gone. The shelf life of mobile apps these days is getting shorter and shorter.

The mobile world is moving towards smartphones, and there are no less than five
major mobile operating systems that developers must address in their apps: Android,
BlackBerry, iOS, Windows Mobile/Windows Phone, and Symbian. Each one of these
platforms also has its own versions and form factors (e.g., smartphone vs. tablets) that
developers must contend with; and new OS’s and devices are coming out faster than
ever. Furthermore, developers not only have to worry about the various native device
operating systems, but different types of device-side technologies such as HTML5,
mobile Web, and SMS-based apps.

With a Mobile Cloud, enterprises and developers are free to leverage whichever device
and client-types that are most suitable for their target app and end-user requirements.
Developers can use a mobile IDE that is a service of the Mobile Cloud to make app
development easier and faster, especially across device platforms. Developers may
also publish apps built on native device IDEs—such as Apple Xcode or Visual Studio
.NET—through the use of API’s to the Mobile Cloud. This development flexibility
ensures that the time to market for apps is minimized, and these apps built on the
Mobile Cloud are future-proofed as the device landscape continues to evolve.


Figure 1: Time to market of Mobile Cloud vs. Internal Build

Ease of deployment
The app store model has changed how we, as end-users, expect to get our apps. As
consumers, we are free to seek out and download apps that we want. As business
users, we are coming to expect this same empowerment. We no longer want to
passively accept the apps that we get with our devices. If we can easily download an
app to manage our household expenses, why can’t we just as easily download an
expense reporting app for work?

A critical function of the Mobile Cloud is to enable ease of app deployment, not just for
consumers, but for business users as well. This means that enterprises should be able
to easily publish role-based apps through their own channels (i.e., private enterprise
app stores) to their customers, employees and partners—bypassing the need to
distribute apps through device manufacturer or carrier app stores, if they choose. This
distribution model is key to democratizing mobility for the workforce and to ensuring
proper brand control throughout the mobile app lifecycle with consumers.


Figure 2: Mobile app deployment and publishing via the Antenna Mobile Cloud

Reliability
Mobility is all about getting data from point A to point B, but the main challenge lies in
the nebulous middle area. The two end points are known (e.g., a backend host system The Antenna Mobile Cloud has
and a smartphone device), but the in-between contains many unknowns—such as achieved 99.95% availability of our
speed of connections, bandwidth, communications protocols, availability of networks, systems, or better, since 2006.
load balancing, and redundancy. In the wired world of telecommunications, operators • 2006 uptime – 99.95%
strive for “the five nines” or 99.999% reliability, which is about half an hour of downtime • 2007 uptime – 100%
in total per year! Mobility may not achieve that level of reliability yet, but the Mobile • 2008 uptime – 100%
Cloud makes it easier to ensure maximum uptime. • 2009 uptime – 99.96%

The Mobile Cloud makes mobile apps more reliable because all the idiosyncrasies of
mobility are seamlessly processed and managed within a unified technology stack—
rather than passing through an array of systems and data centers. Some may refer to it “After reaching around 4.6 billion
as mobile middleware, but it’s much more than just integration between the host mobile cellular subscriptions by the
systems and devices. The Mobile Cloud’s technology architecture also encompasses end of 2009, ITU expects the
data compression for faster performance and better battery life, network sensing and number of mobile cellular subscrip-
optimization for superior usability regardless of coverage, guaranteed messaging and tions globally to reach five billion in
data integrity in an unpredictable wireless world, security and management for tighter 2010.”
control, and transactional reliability for optimal operations. The result is that enterprises — International Telecommunication
can simply plug into the Mobile Cloud to ensure that their apps have the greatest Union, February 15, 2010
reliability and availability.

Scalability
The mobile user population is vast, and continues to grow at a rapid pace. More and
more workers are finding the need for smartphones and tablets in their day-to-day
work whether inside or outside the office. Consumers are increasingly making mobile


devices their preferred choice for quick and easy access to their apps and the Web,
rather than through a desktop. What this entails for any enterprise contemplating a The worldwide mobile worker
mobile strategy, is that they have to think big. population is set to increase to 1.19
billion in 2013, accounting for 34.9%
Don’t think about deploying mobile apps to just a couple of hundred of employees or of the worldwide workforce
to a few thousand customers. Think about what it means and what it would take to — IDC “Worldwide Mobile Worker
scale the mobile deployment to the entire company and to the entire customer base. A Population 2009 – 2013 Forecast”
shiver may run through the spine of the CIO just thinking of all the capital investments
and personnel required to support such a deployment.

The Mobile Cloud is essential to address scalability. Enterprises can leverage it to
smoothly expand their mobile app roll-outs, while also enabling them to deal with
unexpected spikes in usage. What this means is that companies can easily add, or
even subtract, users from the deployment without having to worry about the ramifica-
tions on the internal IT environment and resources. Moreover, the Mobile Cloud is built
with overhead to accommodate spikes in transaction volumes and mobile app activity,
so that any surge in the popularity or usage of an app can be handled without disrup-
tions to service.

Currently, the Antenna Mobile Cloud
processes more than 35 million
transactions per month from mobile
Support
users.
The Mobile Cloud is not just about technology; it is also about the people supporting it.
The main challenge for many organizations trying to build a mobile infrastructure is that
The Antenna Mobile Cloud has
it takes time and experience—a luxury that cannot be afforded in today’s ultra-competi-
built-in capacity to accommodate a
tive markets. The Mobile Cloud offers instant access to people with the know-how and
doubling of typical transaction
skills to not only implement the mobile strategy, but also to support the deployment
volumes for the trailing 12 months.
operationally to make sure the company and its users reap the maximum benefits.

The work doesn’t stop once an app is deployed or downloaded. One of the main
reasons for the failure of many mobile app deployments is lack of ongoing manage-
ment, support and feedback—particularly for employee-facing apps. It is rare that you
ship an app and expect users to instantly fall in love with it. Inevitably there will need to
be tweaks and updates to the apps—maybe just for specific user groups. The Mobile
Cloud offers support services that can help identify and quickly get these incremental
updates out to the field and have them be made transparently to the user is critical to
successful app adoption and usage.

Additionally, the beauty of mobile apps is that it offers so much rich data into the
behavior of the user. The Mobile Cloud can capture all this data—from screen views to
login activity—and enable analysis of it to further improve upon the app. This capability
is especially valuable for consumer apps since analytics from the Mobile Cloud can
provide instantaneous and detailed glimpses of what your customers are interested in.


Cost of Ownership
The Mobile Cloud refers to a multi-tenant infrastructure where the hardware and
software systems for mobility reside outside the enterprise and are shared among
many customers. Companies can share resources and applications without a high level
of capital expenditure or impact to their own hardware and software resources. This
multitenant approach reduces the costs of the Mobile Cloud to each customer and at
the same time it enables them to take advantage of new innovations driven by all
customers and applied to the Mobile Cloud. The result is not only a lower total cost of
ownership, but a greater benefit from joint innovation.

When evaluating a Mobile Cloud (and cloud computing in general), companies naturally
want to compare TCO against an internally deployed project. However, such compari-
sons are often not “apples-to-apples”. By going with a cloud-based vendor, companies
get price transparency and they can predict what their costs will be. Companies are
provided with the pricing structure and typically have set contracts that define the
pricing parameters and the project deliverables. In comparison, internal projects may
start with a set budget, but it may get out of scope quickly and there is no single
vendor to hold accountable.

The antenna mobile cloud
For customers that choose the Antenna Mobile Cloud, they are choosing a solution
that has a long, successful heritage. The Antenna Mobile Cloud has a proven track
record of ROI for its Global 1,000 customer base.

Figure 3: The Antenna Mobile Cloud


The Mobile Cloud is not simply a solution where the mobile app servers are hosted in a
third-party data center for the customer, which many mobile software vendors can “95 percent of respondents were
easily do. The Antenna Mobile Cloud is run as a carrier-grade Network Operations Cen- satisfied with Antenna as their
ter (NOC) with a multi-tenant architecture, full redundancy, and end-to-end enablement hosted mobile solutions provider,
and support services to make consuming our cloud services as easy as possible. and 97 percent would recommend
Antenna to a colleague.”
The AMP Gateway, which is the heart and brains of the Antenna Mobility Platform, — Antenna 2009 Customer Service
manages transactions from the backend host systems to the wireless devices, without Satisfaction Survey
the need to store or replicate host data in the cloud. The customer’s mobile project
teams (developers, administrators, managers, etc.) have secure, role-based access to
a Web management dashboard—the AMP Management Center—and to the Eclipse-
based development environment—AMP Studio. By leveraging the Antenna Mobile
Cloud, customers also gain a unique advantage because it provides complete visibility
“Our resources are doing develop-
into every detail of a customer’s mobile deployment status. As a result, Antenna can
ment on the cloud at Antenna. That
provide unparalleled 24x7 customer support that can proactively monitor, troubleshoot,
gave us the ability to jump start
and mitigate network issues to minimize system downtime.
everything. We knew this was the
right strategy to transform to a
conclusion
real-time, event driven value chain.”
The Mobile Cloud is a relatively new phenomenon, but one that is important because it
is the intersection of two pervading technology trends: mobility and cloud computing. — Kevin Flowers, Director of
The Mobile Cloud can be used to transform your entire business by driving real-time, Enabling Technologies, CCE
frictionless operations, impacting not just internal employees, but also external partners
and your end customers. It offers the quickest route to deploying game-changing
mobile apps, while ensuring that the solutions built are not made obsolete by the fast
changing mobile technology market.

The Mobile Cloud is different from other cloud services, because a Mobile Cloud needs
to address all the intricate nuances of mobility (such as a diversity of devices and
wireless networks) while providing a truly shared infrastructure. By harnessing the
power of the Mobile Cloud, you can gain key competitive and business advantages in
deploying mobile apps, while ensuring a solid foundation for your long-term mobile
strategy.

Get Ready to Deploy Happiness
Are you ready to take your mobility strategy to the next level? To learn more about the
Antenna Mobile Cloud, AMP or other Antenna products and services:

Visit www.antennasoftware.com

Call (888) 723 2832

Follow @antennasoftware on Twitter


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