2011 – Is a MEAP year for mobile apps development

There isn’t a day that goes by without a news article about mobile smartphones or mobile apps. The mobile app market is the fastest growing technology mankind has ever known. Don’t believe me? Have a look at these stats:

• Television was commercially available in Europe in 1929. Over 80 years later there are 600 million TV subscribers globally.
• Mobile phones were commercially available in Japan by NTT in 1979. Over 30 years later there are 5.1 billion users globally.
• The internet (World Wide Web) was commercially launched in 1982. Less than 30 years later there are 2 billion users globally.
• In 2006 people asked “What’s a mobile app?”
• In 2008 people asked “Have you heard of the AppStore?”
• In 2010 Apple alone has had almost 10 billion apps downloaded from their AppStore.
• In 2011 there are already 394 million smartphone and tablet subscribers

In less than a decade, there have been more downloads of mobile apps than there are TV, mobile phone and internet users combined globally.

2011 is set to experience even more growth of mobile app downloads as more people upgrade their basic mobile phones for smartphones and tablets. The growth potential for mobile phone subscribers migrating to smartphones and tablets is enormous!!!

Many businesses have been scrambling to build and release access to their products and services via mobile apps. Whether to increase brand awareness, to increase revenue or to add value by providing access to services for clients on the run, it has become essential for many company’s business strategies moving forward. And why not, with success stories from companies such as Domino’s Pizza (increased sales of 2 million in the first 12 weeks of their iPhone App release) and Australia Post (had the number 1 Australian iPad App within weeks of launching)

The process involved for a company to design, build, deploy and maintain mobile apps is not a cheap or easy one. Many companies have “dipped their toes in the water” by only releasing mobile apps on iPhone or iPad. With the exponential growth in Android smartphones and tablets, such as the upcoming launch of the Blackberry Playbook, the costs to replicate that development to support these new form factors and operating systems start to become a real challenge and concern.

For the majority of companies that have released a mobile app into the market (fast food, banking, finance, retail etc) or are thinking about it, it is NOT their core business. As a consequence, they must invest money and resources to keep up with the release of upgrades to existing operating systems every 6 months and new form factors every 12 months.

With such rapid changes and growth, it is not hard to understand many of the common challenges and concerns companies face. Security, development, deployment and expansion of an existing mobile apps to other handsets, support and maintenance of apps, how to keep abreast of mobile technology, how to measure the success of your apps and how to keep them fresh and current to maintain its appeal to customers, are just the tip of the iceberg.

If we have learnt anything from the explosion of mobile apps, with hundreds of thousands of apps available and billions of downloads in less than 3 years, it is this. Just because you can build a mobile app, doesn’t mean you should. Many companies judge the success of their mobile app by the number of downloads; however, studies have shown that many apps are downloaded but infrequently used.

The formula for successful mobile apps seems simple enough. Make them easy to use and intuitive ( minimal screen taps to access the information you want), make the access to information quick and relevant, make the mobile app a tool that clients, WANT to use, NEED to use and CAN’T do without! Get this right and you are the talk of the town …get this wrong and you could be harming the brand and image of your company.

The question is fast becoming: how do we keep up-to-date with these changes without the need to create a whole new department specialising in mobile apps development?

This is where a Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP) comes in.

A MEAP takes care of all the “heavy lifting” required for building a mobile app by allowing companies to design the app through a configuration tool. This process eliminates the need for coding or compiling the mobile app. It allows for rapid development and deployment of multiple mobile apps. It delivers pre-built connectors or the tools to quickly build custom connectors to plug into your data sources regardless of whether they are web services or legacy systems.

It delivers reporting tools for measuring the success of your application (not just the number of downloads) and provides security features to ensure that you don’t experience issues like those that recently plagued the banking industries in the United States. Best of all it can reduce the number of resources required to build, manage and maintain your mobile apps, thus reducing your costs.

And if you are thinking “bleeding edge” technology, then think again. Many of the MEAP platforms (Sybase, Antenna, Pyxis Mobile) have been around since early 2000.

Take Pyxis Mobile for example. They have been providing their MEAP platform for over 8 years, with more than 3,000 corporate clients in the United States. They have released both Enterprise and Consumer mobile apps to the market successfully in timeframes many regard as impossible.

If you want to utilise existing in-house web skill sets in HTML5, JavaScript or CSS, you can create native apps across all mobile operating platforms via Nitobi's PhoneGap 1.0 offering.

Providing mobile apps to consumers is a great way to gain brand exposure, but what about your employees? Many enterprise organisations have spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions, on their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software to improve processes and customer service. While many companies have seen improvements in processes through these deployments, access to these systems for mobile employees still physically chains them to their desks.

While companies have been busy building mobile apps for their consumers, many have put the mobilisation of internal systems into the “too hard basket”. Mobile Enterprise apps are no longer a luxury, but a necessity for companies to capitalise on the investments they have already made in their systems and processes.

MEAPs not only allow you to configure and deploy consumer mobile apps, but also business and partner mobile apps. The ability to connect into multiple data sources and access just the right information can improve the efficiencies of your mobile workers exponentially.

The benefits to employees include being able to access client information at their fingertips, plus information on the latest meetings and meeting notes, the last orders from the client, graphs on their spend history (to see if they are buying less from you, which could mean they are increasing their orders from your competitors) access to stock inventory, delivery times, debtors and outstanding invoices, or RSS links to media releases on your clients, so that you can have an intelligent conversation about what is affecting their business.

What about the ability for your employees to “click to map” and see any other clients or prospects to visit in the local area on an easy-to-view map, with instructions on how to get there? Imagine an employee receiving some competitor information, then entering it into your Enterprise mobile app with a notification being broadcast to all other employees, giving your team and business the competitive edge. While all this information is accessed via different data sources (CRM, ERP, Web services, Mapping services etc) it can be displayed on a single screen that can be drilled down into.

If your company is one of the many that are considering or now employing a BYO (bring you own) handset/tablet policy, that’s OK too, for the application that you designed on your MEAP platform can be deployed to the leading smartphones and tablet devices in a single instance.

What does that mean? It means you design your mobile app just once and it can be used on an iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android or Android tablet simultaneously. It doesn’t matter if the mobile app is a consumer, business or partner app, a MEAP platform doesn’t care.

Why do I predict 2011 as a MEAP year? It delivers a solid foundation to any company’s mobile strategy and takes care of many of the hidden “gotcha’s” in developing and deploying mobile apps. Here are 7 reasons.

1. It provides code-free development of mobile apps, allowing your company to concentrate on how the application looks, how it feels, how it flows, how it behaves, how to make it easy and intuitive to navigate and most importantly how to make it successful.

2. It allows you to control the security of all your mobile apps, deliver data integration easily, receive an audit trial and understand the usage patterns of the mobile app, to define what is successful and remove what is not.

3. It delivers the ability to conduct a single build of a mobile app that runs natively on the leading smartphones and tablets (i.e. integrating access to camera, mapping, calendar, contacts, supporting different screen sizes and navigation methods such as touch screen or keyboard).

4. It removes the R&D required by your company to keep abreast of the constant changes in mobile technology by providing constant updates to meet these changes.

5. It delivers total control over the building of the mobile apps with minimal resources required to design, build, integrate, deploy and manage those mobile apps. Alternatively, you can easily outsource the building of the apps but still retain the IP of the app that was built for you.

6. It delivers a competitive edge by allowing you to rapidly develop and deploy new mobile apps in weeks not months, or make changes to improve the look, feel or process of existing mobile apps in hours not weeks.

7. It allows your company to deliver apps for different business to meet their market segments whether internal or external, all from a single platform.

Enterprise companies are not geared, nor do many want to be geared, as mobile app development houses. If your strategy is to deliver a single mobile app to a single device, such as iPhone, then the traditional process of custom developing your mobile app (building the mobile app via programming code) is best suited to that.

However, if mobile apps are part of your company’s ongoing strategy for branding, exposure, increasing sales and revenue or improving employee access to internal systems, then a MEAP approach to delivering mobile apps makes a lot of sense, both commercially and strategically. Sybase recent conducted a survey of 250 Enterprise clients in the USA and UK, where 4 out of 5 clients will be releasing between 5 to 19 mobile apps this year, yet 1 in 2 don’t have a mobility strategy.

If you want a solid foundation to deliver your company’s mobile app strategy with extensive configuration options for building mobile apps, institutive management tools for reporting and analytics on how your mobile apps are being used and, and a low cost of ownership when delivering them, a Mobile Enterprise Application Platform could be your answ