Custom business apps are in high demand. Businesses need mobile apps to stay competitive. Mobile applications done right have the potential to increase employee productivity as well as enhance business workflows or create new markets. Enterprises are trying to mobilize their workforce, but progress has been slow. What's holding up enterprise mobile development?
We know from talking to businesses and developers that the stumbling blocks relate to the complexity that is often involved in building enterprise and business apps and also the skills shortage that exists re mobile developers. Enterprise apps require features such as offline support and data security, complex features not normally found in consumer mobile apps. Apps may need to work on multiple platforms, doubling the overhead and development time to create your apps. Additionally, finding and hiring application developers to build these apps can delay the start of mobile development for months.
We also know from Gartner, that enterprise mobile apps need to deal with real world challenges such as:
- Data Integration with various back-end data sources
- Mobile security to ensure business data is transmitted securely
- Offline capabilities, allowing your workers to be truly mobile
- Support for native functionality, such as using the camera or device location, to capture data
The Development Challenges of Mobile Enterprise
It was with great interest that we came across this slide from the recent IDC Directions conference held in Boston and Silicon Valley
What is revealing is that the IDC data is consistent with Gartner's view of the world and helps quantify that "security, data integration, and time/cost to develop" have been the biggest stumbling blocks till now. This should help explain why at Alpha Software we are passionate about 'slaying the dragons' that are holding companies back from meeting their mobilization objective!
For an overall summary of core capabilities in Alpha Anywhere that are designed to meet the key needs that business have re mobilization, check out this one page summary with short explanatory videos explained in plain English!
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