Gain Tangible Business Results With Mobile Apps

The increasing popularity of mobile devices encourages brands to utilise the platform as a first point of contact with consumers, partners, and employees. On an average, a person checks his/her smartphone 150 times in a day and mobile transactions are also witnessing a prominent increase. There exists an ever-growing network of 1.9 billion Internet-connected devices

Numerous businesses are taking a tactical approach and transforming their business into a mobile-enabled enterprise. Transforming existing websites into mobile-enabled modes and putting an app in the app store is the very first approach towards mobility.

The mobile strategy includes a platform that can support thousands of apps on a variety of devices and operating systems, management, security and analytical capabilities. In addition, open cloud technology maximises the flexibility and manages the increasing amount of data and content on a secure platform.

Recently, IBM announced a suite of apps for business leaders to deploy industry-specific capabilities with the significant expansion of its IBM MobileFirst Application Development portfolio with new industry-specific IBM Ready Apps. Prashant Sharma, Country Leader, MobileFirst, IBM India/ South Asia, commented that, it will help developers from big enterprises as well as small entities to design, deliver and deploy secure mobile apps quickly – preventing data leaks and vulnerabilities – with the same speed and simplicity that consumers expect.

Advantages of Flexible Mobile Apps

1. A complete range of tools for developers to create, deploy and manage mobile apps, on-premise or in the cloud: The technologies and services enable developers to quickly build and deploy mobile apps. According to Prashant, IBM is offering mobile enterprise app development platforms ‘Worklight’, and ‘Bluemix’ that deliver similar capabilities as cloud-based services. Both can be used with Cloudant, IBM’s NoSQL distributed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) for mobile apps.

With the redefined mobile application developer platform, Worklight, enterprises are getting grade security and integrated quality assurance, so clients can build better, more secure apps faster. It also features a new app scanning capability to identify potential data leaks and vulnerabilities. Additionally, it gets mobile application life cycle capabilities that allows enterprises to optimise mobile user experience by supporting both native (via SDKs) and hybrid development models, as well as by adding new capabilities such as the USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) protocol for mobile money solutions in emerging markets. Both IBM Worklight and BlueMix offer mobile quality assurance capability to help developers track user experiences and provide sentiment analysis, crowd sourced feedback submissions, and in-context crash reports that identify problems for rapid resolution.

2. A suite of industry-specific, pre-configured IBM Ready Apps that can save up to 60% of time and resources: Whether an organisation is just getting started or has multiple successful mobile projects underway, the streamline design enables organisations to customise their app and deploy it to any platform or device. Organisations can also tailor the look and feel of apps and add features using built-in integration with common industry APIs.

The suite of Apps includes apps for banking, retail, healthcare, insurance, travel and transportation, government over connected devices. Prashant added further that the App for Industrial and Connected Home Users can control and configure devices throughout their home such as setting the thermostat, arming the in-home alarm system, turning lights on or off and set/adjust appliance settings. In addition, users can also view the amount of energy being used by a specific home device or in an aggregated view of all devices in the home. Similarly, the App for Retail will help retailers benefit from the use of an in-store performance dashboard to track productivity, look up inventory, view store maps to analyse in-store footfalls and prioritise customer service.

Tips to make your Enterprise Mobile ready

• Know your users and understand their challenges – Identify the stakeholders that will have the highest impact because of mobility and understand their challenges. Understand how mobility can make their job easier and more productive.

• Explore, assess, and plan – Explore, assess and plan your mobile platform to address current and future business and technology requirements that are unique to your organisation, industry and users.

• Get connected – Increase your enterprise’s agility with new mobile apps connected to backend systems and applications, with accelerated application delivery and support for all types of apps.

• Leave room to grow – Ensure that your existing systems are able to support your mobile business initiative. Build them to allow access to thousands

of users.

• Safegaurd your networks– Take geo-location and the objective of your users into consideration while building your systems. Be sure to provide secure transactions and data access from an array of devices while keeping your networks safe and efficient.

• Think BYOD – Consider how ‘Bring your own device’ (BYOD) and ‘Corporate Owned-Personally Enabled’ (COPE) devices can increase the productivity of your employees, especially when they can easily connect to networks, data, and apps.

The Indian mobile services market

According to NASSCOM, about 840 million active mobiles are operational in India and IDC forecasts the growth of CAGR of 63% from $394.3 million in 2012 to $1.8 billion by 2017. The growing mobile market is challenging for enterprises to provide mobile solutions to their users. Are you ready for it?