Table of Contents
- Summary
- The current state of mobile application development
- Mobile application configuration
- Key takeaways
- About Larry Hawes
- About GigaOm
- Copyright
1. Summary
A new breed of services now promises to accelerate the mobilization of existing enterprise applications and business processes. Early mobile-application development solutions were resource-intensive, requiring custom client code for each supported platform, as well as an on-premise middleware layer to connect mobile clients to enterprise backend systems. In this model, mobilizing an existing enterprise application could take months and adding new platforms brought additional development burden and risk.
Mobile application development platforms (MADP) and mobile backend as a service (MBaaS) offerings revolutionized the landscape, consolidating tools and services to simplify cross-platform development. Time-to-launch for enterprise mobile applications decreased significantly, as did related development costs. However, companies were still required to hire specialized employees with the skills needed to develop and maintain mobile applications.
Now, coding-free configuration solutions can eliminate development entirely by providing device-native pathways to key backend systems — solutions that are aimed at business analysts and line-of-business personnel, not developers. This report reviews mobile-application configuration (MAC) tools and their business value. It will help IT decision makers and line-of-business executives understand the conditions under which MAC tools may be a good choice for an organization.
Key findings in this report:
- Traditional enterprise mobile-application development approaches are relatively costly and time consuming because they require developers with specialized skills and training to write, test, and modify significant amounts of code.
- Mobile-application configuration offers an alternative that IT or business employees can use to create working mobile versions of existing enterprise applications in less time and at a lower cost.
- Enterprises should explore deploying MAC tools in place of, or in addition to, MADPs, native SDKs, or HTML5 when they need to create and launch mobile versions of existing enterprise applications quickly.
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