10 Technologies for 2011 : 9. Mobile Apps

Mobile Apps

Yes, Mobile Devices and related technologies seem over represented in this list of top ten technologies for 2011. Thats because mobile technology is driving massive change in the technology sector. The decades old dominance of the PC platform is being supplanted at breakneck pace by mobile devices.

The traditional model of IT groups dictating what devices could connect to corporate systems is fading away fast. New devices from Apple and the myriad vendors who support the Android platform are being brought into the workpace without any prior approval. The line between the personal use of mobile devices and corporate devices is getting blurred. The iPad is being adopted at positively astounding rates by senior management. The days of the ultralight laptop as status symbol are numbered. Showing up at meetings with an iPad is almost expected when you get closer to the top of the corporate ladder.

What does this mean for corporations that create content that traditionally was delivered by a dedicated desktop app or even a web 2.0 app delivered through a standard browser ?

It means every company needs a mobile strategy. At the top of the house, there must be commitment to considering mobile devices to be first class citizens when designing content delivery channels. It is a hard pill to swallow for many but the fact is mobile devices entering the market place now are more powerful than perhaps 75% of business desktops out there for general compute tasks, lagging perhaps only in their graphics rendering prowess.  Given that corporate desktop refresh cycles run typically 3 years, it is almost a certainty that in the next year personal and corporate mobile devices will be more powerful than desktop computers employees may have.

So what are the main elements of a mobile application strategy:  (1) Decisions around targeting a specific device family (iOS, WebOS, Android, Windows Phone 7 etc) or to build a general browser based app that is smart aboyt scaling down to mobile devices. (2) Decisions around free vs paid or a hybrid freemium business model to deliver content. (3) Decisions around online vs offline access to content. (4) Decisions around extending the corporate web brand or starting afresh (4) Training or hiring new staff for mobile device development or retaining a third party specialist firm. (5) Rapid iteration of a concept vs execution of a fully realized plan.

Some of these decisions may seem obvious to many of us, however each company's market position and preparedness is different and that must influence their decision making.

Common pitfalls include underestimating the complexity and expertise required in user interface design for mobile devices, underbudgeting for long term maintenance of the application as well as not factoring in the influence customer reviews of mobile apps that are part of every app store now.

10 Technologies for 2011: 2. Mobile Device Management Software

2. Mobile Device Management Software

   As the trickle of new mobile devices allowed to access Enterprise Data sources has swelled into a flood in the past few years, the management of these devices has become a major challenge for those responsible for provisioning, auditing, usage tracking and security of these devices. It used to be that the software for managing these devices fell neatly into two camps: Blackberry Enterprise Server from (BES) from RIM and ActiveSync from Microsoft. While RIM took care of its own devices, the rest of the world was typically managed through ActiveSync. Microsoft provided for a set of policies that could be enforced to varying degrees on different mobile devices. 

As the amount of data that can be stored on these mobile devices go up, the challenge of keeping that data secure requires enforcing specific policies such as requiring that all data stored is encrypted, that there is a password required on the device, that the device can be remotely wiped in the event of loss etc.

 Apple licensed ActiveSync technologies from Microsoft and this allowed iPhone users to access resources such as Microsoft Exchange without too much trouble. In fact iPhones self enrolled in ActiveSync in more user friendly ways than Microsoft's own Windows Mobile devices. The advent of Android has changed all of that. With a veritable explosion of devices on multiple carriers driven by Google's Android, tracking the specific capabilities of individual devices became an impossible task.  

To start with, there are so many flavors of Android from 1.6 to 2.3 already available, with many more in the wings. Tracking and enforcing policies on these various flavors is no small task.  For example a particular information resource in the Enterprise may require that any mobile device that is authorized to access it must support remote wipe of the device. ActiveSync may dictate that if a device does not support this policy it cannot connect. However this depends on the device telling the truth.

It is unclear whether the various stock Android flavors and OEM variations actually report the true capabilities of the devices it runs on. To make matters more complicated, Android as an operating system is famously open and allows users to change settings more than other platforms do.  Finally, there are known ways to bypass these restrictions by means of software that ensure the expected responses are sent back to ActiveSync regardless of the true posture of the platform. As a result ActiveSync in its current form has a hard time managing these devices.

Into this brave new world of rapidly shifting capabilities, policies and devices, 3rd party mobile device platforms such as Good Technology has stepped in with specific defenses against the subterfuge of software bypasses and promising to keep pace with the relentless progression of devices in the Enterprise. We can expect Microsoft to also step up its game with newer versions of ActiveSync and potentially a stable of third party plugins. 

10 Technologies for 2011 : 1. Mobile Devices that blur the line between Smartphones and Computers

As 2011 gets underway in earnest, and the C.E.S. show is behind us, its time to look at 10 technologies that are going to dominate 2011 for CIOs and CTOs.

1. Mobile Devices that blur the line between Smartphones and Computers
    The launch of the iPhone in 2007 changed the world of enterprise computing forever. Although Microsoft and Palm had competed for mind and marketshare for more than a decade with various versions of PocketPC and PalmOS based devices, they never found an audience beyond the heavy power users who treated them as highly specialized PDAs. The iPhone changed all that. With the launch in the full glare of the media propelled by the polished presentations at MacWorld and Apple WDC by none other than Steve Jobs, suddenly the smartphone became "cool" and a status symbol at work.

The launch of the AppStore with support for third party apps made the phone genuinely useful for casual users. The email and calendar sync functions the phone brought with it, drove users to question the need for two devices: One for personal use and another for corporate use (typically a Blackberry). More often than not, the Blackberry and its physical keypad were given up in favor of the iPhone's capacitative buttons, the personal communication device and the business calendaring and email merging together.

Now more than 5 years later, we have seen an accelerating trend: More and more powerful smartphones that are in effect little computers in themselves. The iPad has taken up a niche between a phone and a full fledged laptop and its thriving in its spot. The Motorola ATRIX introduced at CES carries this trend even further: A single Android based device that can be your phone when you travel and when you reach your office, it can be docked and used to drive a full video display with a full keyboard.

This trend of devices that are crossovers exhibiting qualities of both Smartphones and Computers will only accelerate with the arrival of the iPad 2, the RIM Playbook and the various HP Web OS based devices to be announced in Q1 of this year.