By Glenn Johnson, Executive Vice President, Magic Software Enterprises Americas
Enterprise mobility remains atop the priority list for most CIOs in 2015. Mobility is at the heart of business transformation initiatives that impact how employees, partners and customers communicate, share content and collaborate. New mobile apps are fostering new and innovative ways to streamline operations and achieve business process efficiency. But enterprise mobility in 2015 is already starting to look different that it did in the past. Here are five trends that are influencing how mobile apps are developed and used in the enterprise in 2015: 1. Sensors and M2M communications: New sensor networks are being leveraged by mobile apps to enable location-specific processes and insights like never before. Relevant real-time data will accelerate business decision-making, streamline supply chains, enhance customer insight and compress time-to-market. 2. Next generation interactivity: With the advent of proactive context-aware notifications, pattern recognition and enhanced speech technologies, user interfaces are evolving from passive point and click designs to dynamic context-aware interactions. Greater voice control, vibration alerts, motion and orientation detection, and interaction with small, wearable tethers and devices are all making the screen a less significant part of how we interact with mobile apps. Context-aware apps will use sensors and web services to anticipate user needs and provide the relevant type of interaction, such as touch and voice control, when and where appropriate. 3. Improved performance: Consumer-scale apps put enormous pressure on the scalability of mobile app servers. Gaps in network communications generate the need for offline capabilities. Backend systems need to support in memory computing in order to achieve the elastic scalability needed while at the same time providing synchronization approaches that enable offline app modes. As more and more enterprises discover solutions that support offline and in-memory approaches, robustly performing apps will become the norm. 4. Focus on value: As enterprise mobility enters the mainstream in 2015, businesses are demanding value for money in their enterprise mobility initiatives. One of the best ways to control costs is to adopt platform technologies that provide the flexibility to provide best-fit solutions for varied development needs. Platforms that support native, HTML5 and hybrid app development and deployment enable developers to choose the appropriate method for each situation. Users tend to perceive greater value in native apps but time-to-market considerations and device coverage often point to the need for HTML5. Choosing a best of both worlds approach will yield the value desired by users while controlling costs in complex environments. 5. New attention on data quality: So much attention is focused on devices, interfaces and business logic that data quality is often overlooked in enterprise mobile apps. We see increased priority being placed on data quality and deduplication efforts by IT departments in 2015. Many new enterprise mobile apps have, quite frankly, created data duplication issues in the past. 2015 will be the year to start clean up operations by incorporating back-end deduplication efforts through the use of advanced matching algorithms. Enterprises will employ data quality solutions such as integration platforms to match and de-duplicate data across multiple sources and records to allow users to work more effectively. Enterprise mobile apps are at the heart of business transformation initiatives in 2015. Enterprises will need to invest in new mobile application development and deployment infrastructure throughout the year as they pursue expanded agendas in their mobile business strategy to support broad and sweeping business change. Understanding these trends can help you to make these infrastructure choices wisely and with an eye on the future of enterprise mobility.