In the current Economic climate, mobility will take a bigger and higher profile position in the Enterprise. As companies work to streamline processes and in turn costs, mobile applications will step up to the plate to fulfill that need and more. Mobile Applications will give the mobile worker the ability to get the data they need, when they want & where they want, this will give the mobile worker the competitive edge which is a necessity.
Let us explore the mobile evolution... So far we have see three stages of mobile computing.
#1 Communicate, which can be easily explained by two types of applications. Firstly Mobile Alerts – Thin clients with read only information and maybe one button for a response, if any. Secondly, Mobile Mail & PIM, which gives the user the ability to synchronise email, contacts, calendar, as well as instant messaging. My own company Sybase/iAnywhere have recently extended its coverage in this area with Mobile office, which now can be used on iPhone as well as Windows Mobile etc and Sybase Employees even use Mobile Office as our weapon of choice.
#2 Leverage, which can be easily explained by two types of applications. Firstly Mobile Forms – structured input, varied architectures & devices, but being Browser based. Secondly and I believe more exciting, by Mobile Smart Clients with the combination of forms, local small business logic, access to mobile hardware and a locally stored, fully featured database. This aids the Smart Client the ability to access the core data that it may need, even if the mobile user is out of a network location. Think of a Field Engineer, up a pole or down a hole... the application has to work. Then with the further ability to synchronise that local data back to the enterprise, efficiently & securly.
#3 Integrate, which is the most interesting and leads to the most interesting solutions - Mobile SOA, which extends Mobile Smart Client I mentioned in the end of wave #2, with access to existing powerful businesses processes. Also, With more Enterprise data being held on mobile devices, Companies need to be sure that these devices are secure and manageable. In my opinion its now with this third wave that MEAP's (Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms) come to the rescue, not only with the ability to rapidy produce integrated mobile applications, but the ability to have those applications deployed to multiple mobile platforms.
Mobility is a very exciting place
Ian