Enterprise Mobile Applications part 1

A majority of businesses today require being agile in response to changes either in their own environment, their partners’ or in market conditions. One of the key enabler for this is to have access to the appropriate information at any time, anywhere and the ability to take actions accordingly. An important media for such access is the Mobile phone.

Traditionally, mobile phones have been used as medium for personal interactions (Voice and SMS) and utility devices incorporating Personal Information Management (Contact, Calendars etc.), Entertainment (Music, Video, Games), Email access, Internet browsing and more recently Collaboration tools. Any access to corporate systems (apart from primarily emails, contacts and calendars) was developed specifically for a particular Business function and (most of the time) for a particular mobile phone model. This was due to various challenges in developing applications for mobile phones. Some of these being:

* Each major handset manufacturer has its own Operating Systems, SDK and implementation making it a steep learning curve for building applications which use mobile phone’s features

* Variable screen sizes and layouts for different handsets

* Security considerations and tie them to corporate security policies

* Mobile functionality provided by packaged applications are generally not easy to extend and not open to incorporate functionalities from other systems

These challenges make deploying Mobile Applications expensive and time consuming which are often difficult to support. Though there is a growing desire in Organizations to have the ability to do more of their business functions using mobile phones, these factors limit them from investing in such applications.