M ode rni z ing e nte r pr ise i t

Introduction 2

Forget Control — the Mobile Action Is in Enablement 4

Building the Mobile Business: Lessons from the Pioneers 7

The Mobile Enablement Tool Chest 14

An App Strategy for the Mobile Era 17

In the Emerging Mobile World, Content Is King 22

MobileEnablement

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need to share data in new ways with smartphone and tab-let users? The three key technol-ogies to focus on are cross-plat-

form development, data access, and testing and performance monitoring.

Focus on these three key enabling technologies B y R o B e R t L . S c h e i e R

The Mobile Enablement Tool Chest

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1Cross-platform developmentNative apps that execute on the de-vice provide the best performance and exploit the newest hardware fea-tures such as eyeball tracking, says Johna Till Johnson, president of Nemertes Research. But with mul-tiple smartphones and tablets, enter-prises can develop for only a finite set of devices without exorbitant effort, she says. Mobile apps using VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) treat mobile devices as “almost a dumb terminal” to work across platforms, but their performance is usually hunacceptable, she says.

Another increasingly popular op-tion is HTML5, which lets develop-ers use familiar Web development tools to create “hybrid” apps using an abstraction layer such as Apache Cordova to present the native device APIs to the mobile app.

“You’re using bridges to the device so you don’t have the full set of capa-bilities of the device,” says Michael

Facemire, a senior analyst at For-rester Research. For example, an app might be able to activate the camera but not all its features such as filters or panoramic views. Despite such trade-offs, HTML5 “is definitely viable to use if you want to support a wide breadth of devices with a single set of source code,” he says.

A number of vendors sell mobile enterprise application platforms for cross-platform application develop-ment, but sales are slow because customers are unsure they are worth their high price, says Johnson.

2data access

Mobile enablement also requires sharing data from back-end systems in the formats required by multiple mobile devices. One approach is using APIs that can be updated to accommodate new data types, mo-bile devices, and mobile operating systems. IBM API Management, for example, “allows companies to easily

establish poli-cies for critical API attributes like self-registration, quotas, key management, and security policies,” the company says.

The CA Layer 7 API Security & Management Suite helps pro-vide not only identity manage-ment and secure data flows but can transform data from legacy formats such as SQL into forms mobile apps can use, says Dimitri Sirota, senior vice president in the security busi-ness at CA Technologies. It can also optimize data connections with compression to improve perfor-mance, and reduce power usage, he says.

Another back-end data transfor-mation option is Faircom’s C-Tree-Ace database, which provides a front end to Cobol or SQL databases. Danny Severns, IT director for dis-tributor and retailer Dunn Tire, says it greatly reduced the cost and effort of accessing and updating the firm’s Cobol ISAM mainframe files. Dunn Tire is using C-TreeAce for a Web app for retail customers and

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a mobile website through which its drivers can update delivery informa-tion. “We don’t have to rewrite our applications or make any changes to them, and yet we have full SQL ac-cess to all that information,” he says.

Other alternatives include mobile middleware platforms, traditional on-premises solutions such as SAP and Oracle, and cloud-based “back end as a service” offerings that pro-vide scalability as demand grows and shrinks, says Facemire. Among these are Kinvey’s Data Link Connec-tors and StackMob’s Datastore API. Mobile middleware may be the best choice, he says, if a customer will “rely on native or JavaScript objects to represent back-end data, or to make data available offline.”

3testing and performance

monitoringAs mobile apps become more criti-cal to employee productivity and customer satisfaction, testing and

monitoring their performance also becomes essential.

German network and services provider Deutsche Telekom provides code-analysis tools so developers can check the quality of their code as they write it, as well as prepublica-tion testing that includes extensive usage data and feedback from testers, says Frank Fischer, head of platform and technologies in Deutsche Tele-kom’s Digital Business Unit. After the apps are deployed, monitors shipped with them report on every-thing from how well they interact with other apps to how much power they use.

Mobile monitoring and manage-ment is drawing traditional players such as CA, Citrix Systems, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Oracle, along with newer SaaS offerings such as AppDynamics and New Relic, says Facemire. Although most enterprises are still more focused on getting mobile apps out quickly than on their performance, he says, that will change “as mobile becomes more and more prevalent in the enter-prise.”

Robert l. scheier is a veteran technolo-gy writer and editor who can be reached at bob@scheierassociates.com.

As mobile apps become more critical to employee productivity and customer satisfaction, testing and monitoring their performance also becomes essential.

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a

Sharing and accessing information through mobile devices promises rich rewards for businessesB y R o B e R t L . S c h e i e R

In the Emerging Mobile World, Content Is King

s enterprises Move beyond mobile security to mobile enablement, expect to see more data shared by orga-

nizations, both among employees and with customers. Such content takes on several forms, many of which have the potential to provide new business value.

Early results included

8% to 15%

productivity improvements

and

10% to 25%

operating-cost savings.

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immersive contentExpect organizations to use tools such as Apple’s iBooks Author to “create content that is as immersive and interactive as applications,” says Jesse Lindeman, senior director of product management at mobile device management vendor Mo-bileIron.

His customers “are using mobile tablets and smartphones … to really rethink the kinds of content” they generate. Rather than just distribute PDFs with text and images, they de-liver content “via video or through interactive graphs to salespeople.” He also sees customers looking for tools that help track whether and how users view that content, so it can be updat-ed and tweaked to increase its usage.

Others see information-sharing moving even further into augmented reality and robotics. A recent IBM report cited a prototype designed by the Advanced Manufacturing Research Center at the University of Sheffield, U.K., to make field main-tenance and repair workers more productive. “Using wearable devices with cameras attached,” the report

says, “technicians can receive real-time visual support from supervising experts based remotely.” Early results included 8 to 15 percent productivity improvements and 10 to 25 percent operating-cost savings. The informa-tion gathered during the repair pro-cess can be saved and repurposed, the report said, “enabling critical knowledge to be passed along to the next generation of field engineers.”

Contextual contentUpdates of another form of criti-cal content — schedules — will be eased over the next year as “we ex-pect geolocation services in the en-terprise to become more common,” says Andrew Borg, the mobile re-search director at Aberdeen Group. Knowing the real-time location of field sales and service personnel will help employers more efficiently use their time.

Almost every moment, employees throughout the enterprise invent new products or processes, uncover insights, or record useful information that, if shared, could reduce costs, increase revenue or improve customer service.

Using Citrix’s ShareFile, for exam-ple, “a restaurant and hospitality firm can distribute confidential recipes” on tablets, says Phil Redman, vice president of mobile solutions and strategy at Citrix. The company can use location-based services “to de-fine a geographic parameter around the device. If it leaves the confines of that space, the recipes — the in-tellectual property — can be swept from the device.”

Danny Severns, IT director at Dunn Tire, foresees a day when his drivers will remotely transmit odom-eter readings to track the cost of each delivery to determine when “it costs too much to deliver those tires and it’s not worth the business” or to charge that customer more.

Johna Till Johnson, president of Nemertes Research, suggests looking beyond smartphones and tablets to wearable devices for contextual con-tent. A device that monitors exercise and sleep patterns could, for ex-ample, upload that data to the cloud and give consumers rewards or other incentives for healthy behavior. In another scenario, a sensor that could

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monitor a diabetic’s blood-sugar levels could upload that data to a service provider, which would text the user’s smartphone with recom-mendations for how much, if any, dessert is OK to have.

time-critical contentNatural gas supplier SourceGas is considering using tablets to let employees instantly upload photos of which valves control gas flow at a site in an emergency, without the “bottleneck” of transferring them from a digital camera to a comput-er, says spokesman Aaron Owens.

First responders coping with an emergency — or a business that needs an ad-hoc group to tackle a crisis — can also use mobile com-munications as an alternative to email, says Scott Morrison, a distin-guished engineer at CA Technolo-gies.

New content, new workersWith rich presentation of data com-monplace within three to five years, Borg predicts, “we’ll have super-computers in our pockets,” allowing

a manufacturing process flow distributed via an iPad can provide factory technicians with critical context at the fabrication site. courtESy WatchDox

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users to draw insights from a “huge, instanta-neous flow of data.”

This future is not just for the “traditional” knowledge workers: consultants, salespeople, marketers, and business analysts. The next frontier is bringing data “to a technician, a doctor, a nurse, a policeman, the shop floor, a sales assistant,” says Nemertes’ Johnson.

“Once you get away from the idea of just ac-cessing information, to creating it and sharing it from a remote location … you go from mo-bility to mobile enablement.”

Robert l. scheier is a veteran technology writer and editor who can be reached at bob@scheieras-sociates.com.

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“Once you get away from the

idea of just accessing information,

to creating it and sharing it

from a remote location … you go from mobility to

mobile enablement.”