The South African cellular infrastructure has matured to the level that will allow local organisations to move beyond mobility that is limited to accessing e-mail, calendaring and personal information applications.
This is the view of Roy Hobson, MD of Oakwell Solutions, a Johannesburg-based developer of mobility solutions based on the Microsoft .NET platform.
"The time has come for local organisations to mobilise their line-of-business systems for anytime, anywhere access, delivering true power for mobile workers by giving them access to enterprise systems such as enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and business intelligence," says Hobson.
He says local organisations now have affordable access to the level of mobile networks, server networks, Web services and mobile devices necessary to make high business value mobility a reality by integrating enterprise applications and delivering them to smartphones or handheld computers.
Oakwell Solutions has launched the FastTrack integrated mobility accelerator, which is a rapid mobile application development tool to make mobile solutions more accessible to mid-size enterprises.
According to Hobson, FastTrack is the first mobility acceleration tool of its kind in the South African market. He says Oakwell was able to find competing products only in Poland and the US.
"We have recognised the need to accelerate and simplify the process of building, deploying and integrating mobility solutions as well as reduce costs and deliver rapid return on investment," explains Hobson.
Oakwell`s launch of FastTrack follows several implementations of mobility solutions developed using the FastTrack server-based design tool for Metropolitan Life, SAB, Eskort and Holcim.
"In these implementations we were able to reduce the development stage by a third as well as deliver on-going development capability to clients, delivering competitive advantage by enabling the rapid and easy redesign of applications as business needs change," says Hobson.
In addition to its design and deployment functionality, Hobson says FastTrack saves money and ensures applications are up to date by storing all data captured on a mobile form-based application on the mobile device.
"This allows users to continue working in a sometimes-connected environment, and when data is synchronised to and from the mobile device, the central server-based data store is updated and any updates to the forms are deployed to the mobile device as new versions of the application," says Hobson.
Oakwell technology director Shane Coetser summarises that the ability to deploy different data collection forms to different users and configure access rights centrally are the key areas of FastTrack`s value.
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