New Research Finds Mobility “App Gap” in Enterprise IT
Research from VansonBourne Finds that Even Though Workers are Demanding Mobile Business Apps, Factors Such as Security and Cost are Forcing IT Organizations to Delay Formal Mobility Strategies
New research from VansonBourne, based on a recent study of 600 of organizations, found that organizations are not moving fast enough to develop and deploy mobile applications for workers, customers and partners. As a result, companies are missing out on the business advantages of Mobile Apps and creating a so-called “App Gap.”
“The App Gap”
The Vanson Bourne study, conducted between December 2012 and January 2013, found that 95% of the 600 organizations surveyed have employees who use personal mobile devices and applications for work and who trust that mobile technology will improve business outcomes. 92% believe that adopting mobile apps will give them a competitive edge and failure to do so will also put them at a competitive disadvantage. Despite the proliferation of mobile devices, application use and beliefs that mobile technology will benefit business, only around a quarter (29%) has already begun a formal mobility project, though 42% plan to do so in the next year. In addition only around half (51%) of organizations interact with their employees using mobile apps and even fewer (45%) use mobile apps to interact with customers. As organizations make plans to fill the App Gap, they face some roadblocks. According to the research, perceived risks to implementing formal mobility strategies include security (54%), the additional investment required (48%) and the need for ongoing support (47%).
In addition, more than half of companies (56%) are concerned that they lack the skills to develop an appropriate application and application interface across a myriad of mobile devices and platforms.
Why has it been so difficult for companies to move forward with their Mobile Strategies?
The study provides evidence that suggests organizations believe that creating the necessary business applications will be very hard. The study also finds that companies are looking to do the work with new mobile development platforms. The study also finds that almost two-thirds of organizations said that mobile access to critical applications like CRM and ERP would be helpful.
What does this all mean for Alpha developers.
Given Alpha's direction of building a unified platform of creating a complete solution for developers to rapidly build modern applications for mobile devices we think that developers who become proficient with Alpha will be very well positioned for the coming decade.
Lets face it. Companies are smart and they get the importance of mobile, but they now are facing the reality of actually building these data-driven apps with all the coolness of modern consumer mobile apps but also with the functionality, the security, the data conectivity and scalability demanded by business apps.
They are finding out that the skills required to build these apps are more diverse than ever and that the availability of developers with all these skills (such as knowledge of SQL, Stored procedures, Server Side coding, HTML5, CSS3, Javacript, Java, Objective C etc) is very limited.
The bottom line is that building seriously productive mobile apps is really hard to do and is currently very expensive and time consuming.
What is needed are new and better development solutions that address the complexity of building apps for multiple brands and sizes of mobile devices as well as laptops/desktops in a cost effective and timely fashion. This is the gap we are aiming to fill.
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