Businesses are rapidly provisioning and developing apps to realise the ideals of the mobile environment, says Paulo Ferreira, Director of Enterprise Mobility at Samsung South Africa.
Ferreira says a great deal has changed since the 2013 'Consumerisation of IT in the Enterprise' survey by IDG Enterprise, which found that 41% of business leaders said difficulty in making core enterprise applications available remotely was a top mobile app challenge1.
"Leading independent software vendors have recognised the need to 'mobilise' their apps to remain competitive. The likes of Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and Salesforce have released horizontal applications suitable for mobile and workspace environments. Leading business tools are now easy to download from app stores. At the same time, hardware manufacturers such as Samsung have identified the market need for the most commonly-used productivity tools on devices, so our premium devices now come with Microsoft Office for Android pre-installed," he says. "Of course, we would like to pre-load as many business applications as possible on devices; however this is not possible - there are over a million apps available. Corporates have told us there is a need for Microsoft Office on mobile, so we pre-installed it to make provisioning easier for IT."
There is also a significant demand for legacy and custom-built apps to go mobile and this is where enterprises are now focusing their attention, says Ferreira. "We find that corporates tend to break down their employee populations by roles and segments like sales, marketing, finance and HR and then provide apps according to functional needs. They are all trying to address the questions of 'What do I want to mobilise?' 'What should be prioritised?' and 'How will we address mobile access to legacy systems?' This comes down to making employees less dependent on laptops and a physical connection to the corporate network."
Organisations are looking at what they must do to mobilise their custom and legacy apps, says Ferreira. "We find they are looking to the pros and cons of leveraging browser functionality, deploying a mobile enterprise application or writing native apps."
Ferreira says many corporates are leaning towards Mobile Enterprise Application platforms or HTML5 development to reduce the complexity and cost of deploying apps that run across all mobile operating systems; while others are having native mobile apps developed to ensure enhanced functionality and the use of all the features available on each mobile device and operating system. "There is no one-size-fits-all approach to enterprise app development. Considerations like cost, time to market, access to developer teams and the business case for mobilising certain enterprise tools will all come into play when deciding which approach to take in mobilising applications," concludes Ferreira.
Samsung has made software developer kits (SDKs) available to support enterprise and third-party developers in creating applications for Samsung devices. For more information on app development for Samsung devices, go to http://developer.samsung.com/galaxy.
Source
http://www.idgenterprise.com/report/consumerization-of-it-in-the-enterprise-2013
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