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Mobility device access to businesses set to take-off

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CIOL Bureau
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Haranath Lokanadham

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BANGALORE, INDIA: The world of mobile apps has already moved from a “nice to have” to “must have” and that too in a relatively short period of time. The segmentation of the platforms in the Smartphone market has also been redrawn significantly in the last one year, with new segments being created by the tablets. This has put a serious question on the future of some mobile device companies which were once considered undisputable leaders in this segment.

The first wave of mobile apps was largely focused on games and location based information/services. Apple led the wave by setting up a marketplace which is secure and easy to use. As the maturity of the users increased more businesses have started to recognize the reach and effectiveness of the mobile devices. As a result of this, there is a stronger commitment by businesses to have a mobile strategy and presence.

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Be prepared to see a number of businesses announce a “mobility device access” to their business, whether it is the online edition of your newspaper, airline, entertainment channel — news, sports, music on the go. The major players in each segment have already launched their mobile apps, putting pressure on their peers to “catch up” quickly or be left behind.

The next big push by the leading players in the industry is to widen the ecosystem and integrate the offerings on a cloud. Apple has already announced iCloud services and Google has done the same with Android market, where you can access Books, Music and Movies via the cloud from any of the Android devices owned by you. Although similar services have been around for some time, the push given by these two large players is definitely going to build a critical mass of users who will expect more of similar services going forward.

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While the initial applications have been targeted at the individual users, the next wave of mobile app development will see a number of business applications having a mobile interface. So expect to do more work using your mobiles. Till date using the mobile to access corporate email was the most popular application. More and more intranet applications will now have a mobile interface and expect to use your mobile devices not only to grant approvals, make travel bookings, access real time reports while on the move. If the business has a large field operation, it is now possible to track the employees on the field in real time and manage them more effectively, as you now have access to their location in real time. Enterprise Mobility is here and the world is very quickly moving to a “Compute Anywhere” paradigm.

Google has recently announced that it will be launching the latest version of the Android OS “Icecream Sandwich” by Q4 this year. One of the major features of this release is that it will have frameworks in place for a huge spectrum of devices, so that the user experience will remain almost same irrespective of the device used (obviously within the same family i.e. tablets or smartphones). The latest version of Android also supports USB host, which means that a variety of external input devices like keyboard, mouse, trackpad, game controllers can be plugged in directly, expanding the realm of what can be done using your mobile devices. There are a host of other features to enhance the user experience.

Surely the race between the technology providers is very hot and product launches are being made thick and fast. It is a field day for the consumer and the pace will only be constrained by the speed at which consumers will lap up the solutions being rolled out.

(The author is associate vice president, Ness Technologies, India)

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