Gartner recently predicted that demand for enterprise mobile apps will outstrip available development capacity five to one by 2017 (view the press release). Being in the enterprise mobile apps space for more than five years, we are already experiencing this trend. While we not only acknowledge Gartner’s prediction and agree with all the reasons behind it as mentioned by Gartner, we would like to add one more reason to the list, based on all the interactions that we had in the market place.
Off late business stakeholders have not only realized the potential of mobile devices in their enterprise but have also educated themselves enough to know how to use its power to their advantage. As a result, more and more business executives and operational managers are re-inventing their business processes around mobile capabilities, without being shackled by the limitations of a desktop. Let’s take a look at these two scenarios where mobility has changed the way an application is being developed.
- Capturing the GPS location in a quality inspection app to ascertain whether the quality inspector actually visited the location before submitting the quality results
- The ability to pass GPS locations and Pictures while submitting an auto-insurance claim from your phone, making it easier for the insurance companies by speeding up the process.
Now these applications could very well be a web application and in-fact would have been developed and deployed as a web application in web-days but in this new era of mobility, traditional web applications are now ‘starting’ mobile which may or may-not be enabled for the desktop. Another example would be in field services where the current GPS location of the field engineer is captured to figure the driving time and notify the customer as to when the field engineer may arrive at the location. These are only few cases, there are many more use cases that are being envisioned by operational executives for their everyday businesses.
As more and more business executives understand and comprehend various capabilities of a mobile device, they will only innovate their business processes further and more and more applications will move from web/desktop to mobile devices. This is one more reason to the ones mentioned by Gartner, that will only fuel the demand for mobile apps and will only further widen the gap between demand of mobile apps and the supply of mobile programmers.
Gartner also went further in their article to list down best practices to tackle this problem. Out of these suggestions, we find customers struggling the most while choosing the right RMAD (Rapid Mobile App Development) for their needs. RMAD (itself is comprised of multiple flavors from forms enablement to mobile virtualization technologies along with model-driven and codeless platform. Our suggestion is to pick up an RMAD that not only addresses the widening gap between demand and supply but also addresses all the root causes of the mobile app demand. For e.g., a Forms enablement platform or a mobile virtualization platform will address only partial root causes like extending current business applications into mobile but will not address other root causes like re-inventing business processes around mobile.
appsFreedom is a Model-driven, codeless RMAD (Rapid Mobile App Development) platform that address all the root-causes of this surge in mobile apps demand, allowing enterprises to truly become digital enterprise with mobile-enables business processes.