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Over the past decade, mobile technology, and in particular the advent of smartphones, has completely transformed the way many of us live our lives. There has also been a change in the way business is done. India is now the third biggest smartphone market in the world. According to research firm Strategy Analytics, smartphone use in India is growing four times faster than the global average.Like most developing countries, India is clearly emerging as a mobile first market with mobile Internet usage surpassing desktop Internet usage in India in May 2012.
Businesses are recognising the importance of ensuring the seamless transition and integration of their customers, employees, and key suppliers from the fixed world to the mobile world. Key business drivers for enterprise mobility include better customer service, productivity advantage, employee satisfaction, new business opportunities and reduced operating costs. Due to this, the scope of enterprise mobility has skyrocketed and is expected to touch $1bn by 2015.
Enterprise applications can, at a very broad level, be divided into vertical and horizontal applications. Vertical applications are applications specific to the industry (health care , education, transportation, banking etc) that enable new process flow and communication. Horizontal application on the other hand focus across industries, for example sales force applications, productivity applications that leverage native integration of email, desk and calendar in mobile devices and global positioning systems.
Application development has moved beyond architecture and design specification to delivery of a sustainable and cost effective ecosystem. The enterprise application ecosystem is a complex web involving a complete value chain from handset manufacturer, networks, application developers, to end users. Mobile devices are now equipped with increasingly powerful processors and more memory, and they are capable of supporting a more diverse set of applications as well as more sophisticated applications and services. Networks have moved from 2G to 4G and have increased the available bandwidth for mobile data. Network operators (like AT&T and Vodafone) are moving beyond being a data pipe to offering the entire application ecosystem to their enterprises. Application development has spawned an entire range of innovative companies that not only develop vertical applications such as sales field automation, field service, human resources applications but also system integration companies which integrate traditional legacy applications like enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management or business intelligence with the mobile. Other players in the ecosystem provide other solutions like enterprise mobile app store (using which employees can download applications), mobile device management, security management and so on. Services companies too provide distinct value added services like mobile consulting, user experience and user design development and application testing.
This fragmented ecosystem due to multiple platforms, tools, devices and enterprise backends are posing the most serious challenge to the growth of enterprise applications. In other words, the mobile application ecosystem should support millions of devices, thousands of operating systems, multiple application environments and provide functionality that is specific to the end user while ensuring life cycle management, data privacy and security. With mobility solutions moving from person-to-machine and person-to-person communication to machine-to-machine communication, the complexity of the enterprise application ecosystem looks set to increase.
In the coming days, the enterprise app ecosystem will look at alternative technologies in order to solve these challenges. The debate between HTML5 and native applications will continue till there is a clear winner from the functionality/cost perspective. Enterprises will demand more of network operators in terms of speed, bandwidth and billing capabilities. Moreover, there will be a growth in employment for mobile app-focused developers – government agencies, social instituitions will bow to the growing demand for applications similar to what users enjoy in other areas. A lot of knowledge gained from the past would be absorbed in the enterprise application world leading to a revolution in terms of the ecosystem and its current working.
Nester Dias is co-founder, Mobileware Technologies, a mobile software company
