Riding the tidal wave of mobile demand

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I was in Boston this week and had the pleasure of being on the Mobile Connect conference’s Mobile App Development panel, which was moderated by Maribel Lopez of Lopez Research. Maribel managed the discussion with great skill, engaging the audience with quick, show-of-hands responses to questions and inviting the audience to query the panel directly.

The vast majority of audience members had already built or were starting to build mobile apps, though I found it interesting that fewer than 10% of the audience were solely focused on iOS apps. This was definitely a multi-channel group.

There were the usual questions about devices, web vs. native vs. hybrid, security, etc. Yet there was also considerable interest in the types of apps being created, starting points and, notably, how to handle the oncoming tidal wave of demand that will swamp the IT department if they don’t have the right platform in place to meet that demand.

More than anything else, this is the major challenge that enterprise IT departments already face: what will let them scale their ability to provide enterprise mobility so that it meets the needs of every employee who wants to interact with the enterprise through their favorite mobile device? And every employee – literally – wants that.

One specific question was, “Do I mobilize the whole enterprise app or just part of it?” Mobilizing the whole app is counter-intuitive. On something as personal as a smartphone or tablet, who wants an entire SAP suite? Everyone I’ve spoken to (or read about) just wants the specific parts of applications and data that help them do their jobs.

This is what Art King, the Global Infrastructure Architecture Lead at Nike (whom I spoke with prior to the panel), calls role-based apps – apps that pay attention to individuals’ needs. As an organization, IT has to be able to respond flexibly to employees’ (customers’) demands for a personalized mobile experience. As Art King phrased it, this won’t be done by being a single ship with one route but, rather, as a collection of boats that have the same objective (providing appealing, productive, mobile apps) but take different routes to achieve that objective and meet the unique goals of each individual.

Peter Price speaking at Mobile Connect next week

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Mobile Connect 2012 bills itself as “the first event to address the strategic direction that will define enterprise IT for the next decade – building and managing information systems that run on a mobile platform.” So it’s fitting that our CEO Peter Price will be on the “Mobile App Development” panel to help define that strategy at Mobile Connect, which is being held at Boston’s Hynes Convention Center, on June 20th at 1:30 pm.

The panel, led by conference chair Maribel Lopez, will highlight that “building mobile applications is one of the most challenging activities software developers face today – sophisticated programming environments, rapidly-evolving mobile operating systems, and complex IT and user requirements all contribute to an opportunity for both schedule and budget overruns.” Price will discuss Webalo’s new cloud-based service, which is designed to address these challenges, and connects enterprise applications and data to mobile devices in a matter of minutes.

So if you’re going to be in Boston on June 20th, drop by the Hynes Convention Center between 1:30 and 2:15 and learn how much easier, faster, and more affordable your enterprise mobility future can be. We’ll see you there!

Mobile business intelligence for less than $100

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Webalo was recently included in a Slashdot story on How to Do BI on the Cheap, about low-cost mobile business intelligence (BI) tools. The story’s angle is that there are a lot of viable mobile BI options that don’t cost the proverbial arm and a leg, many from companies that also sell software that runs into five figures.

Like the other vendors in the story, Webalo can provide up-to-the-minute mobile access to any enterprise BI applications and data, and that kind of mobile-empowered timeliness is, according to recent reports from Aberdeen and Gartner, vitally important to business decision makers. Because of that, mobile BI is projected to grow exponentially over the next few years.

Yet the mobile options provided by the firms profiled by Slashdot are all BI-only. Webalo, by contrast, provides mobile access to enterprise applications and data from vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, and even in-house custom-built applications, and can incorporate BI content into an infinite number of workflows for operations, manufacturing, marketing, sales, finance, HR, etc.

Given that some of the low-cost solutions in How to Do BI on the Cheap cost as much as $1350 per user per year, our annual user fee of 99 bucks, which lets you configure unlimited enterprise-to-mobile interactions, drives the cost of mobility down to pennies an app, and choosing that kind of cost structure demonstrates true business intelligence.

Analysts praise Webalo for rapidly connecting mobile workers to enterprise applications and data

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VDC Research profiled Webalo in a recent report drawing a clear distinction between us and traditional approaches to mobile app development. “The fact that Webalo is a code-free solution (meaning there is no SDK or mobile development platform) is a positive,” VDC wrote, “and makes the solution very compelling for end-users as it can be quickly implemented and provides access to enterprise applications and corporate data to their increasingly cross-platform mobile workforce.”

VDC understands the impact of our differentiation noting that “the ease with which Webalo may be integrated with current or developed in-house (and often workflow-specific) applications is a huge advantage…” and that Webalo is “a differentiated value play and unique method for delivering corporate data to mobile platforms. Most compelling is the platform’s architecture and self-service design, which provides the ability to very rapidly  provide  mobile workers access to enterprise applications and data that resides behind the corporate firewall.”

Rather than duplicate functionality, we let you just connect to it – a configuration process that takes a fraction of the time required for and SDK/IDE development environment – and that means you can do a lot more with a lot less effort.

You can see the full report here.

451 Research on Webalo: An ‘effortless’ native app experience

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In 451 Research’s latest MIS Impact Report, they acknowledge that, in the beyond-email era, organizations are eager to provide a wide range of data and business workflows on mobile devices and that there are several choices when it comes to deployment. From their perspective, “Webalo has done the trick by making it effortless to present that data within the native app experience. We believe such integration and presentation capabilities bode well for the greater mobilization of internal enterprise business processes on mobile devices.”

Nice assessment. Plus they recognize that achieving greater mobilization involves speed, as well. “The administrative interface allows IT or even non-IT users to select and integrate the data source. They can configure the enterprise integration in minutes, in real time, based on the required data points.”

451 also understands the impact of the upcoming July release on Webalo, its partners and customers, and the enterprise mobile market itself, noting that “Webalo has now made it widely available and hugely scalable by opting for a freemium cloud-based delivery model” which “allows Webalo to scale its customer base and its business, without having to unnecessarily scale the company itself.”

That all adds up to make “effortless” a pretty accurate description. Take a look at the report here.

Henry Ford’s lessons for enterprise mobility

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The Ford Model-T changed the way Americans traveled.

Ford’s use of technological advances, such as interchangeable parts and mass-production, were the enablers of that change. Yet the big impact of what Ford did, the disruption of the market that bought him huge success, was the way his innovations enabled the “long-tail” of automobile “applications” that made cars accessible to the masses.

I was reminded of how far the enterprise mobile application market is from realizing its own, huge, long-tail opportunity when I read a couple of announcements from SAP recently.

A so-called “rapid deployment” of a “quick-start” mobile app is presented in the SAP webinar “Get Mobile in Weeks with SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions.” The company presents the promise of having a “starter” mobile app “in as little as six to eight weeks.” Wow. Weeks?

In a parallel blog, Eric Lai of SAP wrote that the people required to build these quick-start mobile apps cost in the range of $150-$170 an hour. So, fully employed as a consultant for hire, that’s not much short of half a million dollars a year in fees. These developers can apparently command salaries around a quarter of a million dollars a year. The math is not hard. But the concept is hard to swallow.

How many of these folks does it take to do a “quick-start” mobile app? It’s got to be more than one, right? Let’s guess two. That amounts to nearly $100,000 just for the people to build one starter app.

If this is a rare case where quick-start actually means quick-finish, then that is a ridiculous amount of money for one app. If we add that the industry norm defines “quick-start” as something that’s just for starters – something that requires additional effort to make that quick-start app complete and fully functional – then who knows where those costs will go on a per app basis.

At the beginning of his mass-production assembly line, Henry Ford was producing one complete, fully functional car every 90 minutes. By 1920, the line turned out one every minute at a cost of around $5,000 a car (in today’s dollars). Now that’s a scalable model designed to meet the market requirements of the day.

In this time of the all-mobile-all-the-time/BYOD enterprise, how does the SAP model scale? Small companies will require tens of mobile apps, mid-size ones hundreds, and large companies thousands. The SAP cost model above doesn’t suit these needs in the least.

Of course, this is not just an SAP challenge; it applies to the entire market. The legacy, complex, mobile application development software tools and the services required to make them work were not conceived for today’s reality. A new model is needed, something massively disruptive.

A hundred years after Ford’s innovation, you’d expect that we could do better. At Webalo, we do.

 

Where’s the Magic Quadrant for the 98% experiencing today’s BYOD reality?

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This is a topic that comes up in nearly every customer conversation we have, and it’s driven by the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) reality that’s driving fundamental changes in the enterprise.

Recently, I met with a Webalo customer who had taken the time to visit us at our Los Angeles headquarters. In Webalo’s cloud-based world of enterprise mobility, this is pretty rare since face-time with customers is not required for them to get the business benefits of our service. So it was a real pleasure to have an opportunity to talk face-to-face.

The part of the conversation that interested me the most was when they described the IT/User reality of their business.

Their IT reality is a collection of in-house-developed applications (mixed together with some packaged ISV applications) and the challenge of operating and maintaining this primarily legacy environment in the context of today’s real-time, global, business operations.

Their business reality involves mobile users who, in an all-mobile-all-the-time business world, require access to the enterprise information that IT manages in these applications. BlackBerry devices, iPhones, iPads, and Android smartphones and tablets are their users’ devices of choice and, today, those users demand the ability to do the things they want to do on whatever device they use.

No surprises here (though it was exciting to see how well our customer is dealing with this challenge) because their reality is also that of 98% of businesses who face the same enterprise mobility challenge of connecting a legacy IT world with today’s BYOD reality (www.aberdeen.com), which is, well… it’s different.  It requires a flexible, rapid, scalable way to provide mobile access to enterprise applications and data, and without this, IT will find itself in an ongoing pattern of creating a major IT development project for every mobile app required, and that approach is neither scalable nor sustainable.

I recently read Gartner’s new Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms (MADPs, which last year were called MEAPs – Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms), and I was struck by how different the requirements are for our market, tackling our customers BYOD mobile application challenges, rather than those of that old mobile application development world. As Gartner pointed out in its Magic Quadrant report, the programmer toolkits required for that world fall into three categories: native toolkits, web toolkits, or cross-platform toolkits. All of which are hard-core software development platforms.

Of course, these MADP tools (as Eric Lai of SAP/Sybase recently blogged) require the very best of software developer expertise – experts who typically earn $240,000 or more a year – and they are required for that operational type of mobility application. These are the kind of applications that support field service personnel, logistics, and similar remote business processes and which sometimes merit the very high cost of traditional mobile application development platforms, because the business requirement (think FedEx delivery drivers) justifies the substantial resources needed to utilize these traditional, complex MADPs.

Today, however, the number of mobile-capable employees is expanding exponentially, growing beyond these field employees to encompass more than 80% of the workforce. This new mobile user needs different types of enterprise interactivity, and there are very different mobile development requirements necessary to deliver them in this all-mobile-all-the-time/BYOD reality. Speed and affordability are not the least of them.

I’d describe these requirements as follows:

  • A great user experience on the device and a simple IT experience in delivering mobile apps to users.
  • Users will demand the ability to do the things they want to do, so your “app development” model has to scale – it has to enable the high volume production of apps.
  • Given this high volume requirement, speed and cost become paramount, so “same-day” response rates and app costs at pennies per app are also prerequisites.
  • Apps that support existing business processes found in existing enterprise applications.
  • In large corporations, this all has to be enabled at the departmental level – IT cannot be burdened with all the responsibility because their to-do list is already full. This means the model cannot require $240,000 a year specialists. Instead, departmental IT administrators, and perhaps even “citizen developers,” need to be able to use their skills to meet their departments’ enterprise-to-mobile app requirements.
  • In mid-size and small businesses, this new approach is the only valid one because the MADP world is just, well, mad and a cost-prohibitive, IT skills-intensive, non-starter for all SMBs.
  • Secure, robust, scalable, and available goes without saying but provided in a way that utilizes the cloud for multi-tenant accessibility while also supporting behind the firewall deployment if security requirements demand it.

So, come on, Gartner. When 98% of businesses need to satisfy the vast range of mobile application requirements of their entire, all-mobile-all-the-time workforce, MADness doesn’t do it. So where’s the Magic Quadrant for the 98% of businesses facing today’s BYOD reality, like the company that visited us last week?

We’re looking forward to reading it.