Making mobiles business friendly

BANGALORE, INDIA: The IT delivery landscape is undergoing a transition from highly regulated and controlled delivery platforms like mainframes or PCs to mobile devices which is unregulated and uncontrolled.

This trend is on a rise worldwide. The industry has responded to the market pressure and is providing business focused - commercial application online. According to Forrester, mobile development has been one of the top five initiatives in 2011 for nearly all enterprises. A recent survey by the analyst firm showed that more than 50 pc of enterprises are most interested in using mobile applications or mobile optimized websites to reach out to their customers, and providing mobile support to employees isn’t far behind with 39 pc mobilizing employee intranets and 29 pc introducing mobile collaboration solutions.

India is not detached from this revolution. India is witnessing a boom in the mobility space and today ranks 2nd in terms of mobile subscribers at 911mn. Asia Pacific Research Group (APRG) forecasts that revenue for mobile VAS and applications to exceed of US $4 billion by 2015. With lower set-up costs and a huge pool of IT talent, many Western companies are eyeing India for app production, effectively outsourcing this process. But the domestic app market is also booming. The value of the Indian value added services (VAS) industry, which includes mobile apps, was estimated at $3.4bn (£2.2bn) in 2011, according to Deloitte.

The challenge, however, is that this model is driven by customer’s needs and desires who are constantly changing their environment. The emergence of social media and Web 2.0 applications are driving users to expect more from applications in a business environment. However, in reality businesses are encountering system incompatibilities when creating enterprise mobile apps. The industry needs to keep up with the trend and plan for where their customers will be at the time of release of the next “killer-app”.

One primary challenge that businesses face is the supporting of new operating environments. The growing popularity of smartphones means that different mobile platforms need to be considered.

Applications therefore need to be platform agnostic, even if they are mobile web based. More importantly, these apps need to be thoroughly tested to reduce the risk of failure and help lower ongoing maintenance costs. Many core IT systems may already be equipped with well-defined functions that individually or collectively provide a valuable business service.

Exposing the mechanics of these services becomes the main challenge and a good test of architectural prowess for mobile app developers who usually face the challenge of “how” rather than “what”.

When developing mobile apps it is advisable to re-use as much of what is already working, and only build new what is utterly essential. Rewriting a back-end IT system for the sake of a new mobile interface is overcomplicating an already complex IT task; with inherent business risks that are huge.

The trick of re-using proven technology isn’t a new idea: existing web portals, which themselves are usually just hooks into pre-existing IT systems, can be harnessed for mobile apps - if applications are already connected with Internet, IT can focus on the content delivery and management of existing functionality to mobile devices. In theory, all that has to be created is a mobile interface.

Older core systems such as those using COBOL or PL/I are typically better architected for re-use, as the core logic is more easily accessible from calling services such as remote devices. As a result many businesses are choosing to build application portals that allow new (mobile) interfaces to access existing business functions as the simplest approach to providing new mobile applications and services.

In order to future proof systems for the rise of mobile, businesses should assess existing infrastructure and proven business services; and not fall into the trap of re-writing systems just to support a new channel. The key to this is to re-use as much that is already working as possible and look at how this can be built upon where needed.