Like any high-quality tech product, enterprise apps for mobile business operations are hardly future-proof. In fact, because the enterprise mobility solutions industry is so young, development projects in this space can require some major sourcing acrobatics. Getting locked in to a single platform is simply bad news.
Too Many Flexibility Challenges
Building the best solution for your company often involves working with multiple service providers and internal stakeholders, each working with its own system. Design, debugging, deployment, analytics and governance often each have distinct silos when it comes to enterprise mobility management. Even once your app is up and running well, your company’s needs may evolve quickly, requiring that you take a native app offline, or vice versa. What’s more, the best solution for one app may not apply at all to subsequent projects.
Most app vendors work with proprietary technologies and platforms that don’t integrate easily with others, so getting your various apps to talk to each other and your data center requires still further development. These vendors want to lock their customers in to sticking with their platforms, so when you decide to take your business elsewhere, you may need to say goodbye to the product that you’ve put so many resources into.
Further complicating the issue is the rampant misuse of the word “open” to woo enterprise customers. All too often, vendors will point to a minor data export functionality available in their platform and claim that this renders the whole thing open. For instance, some vendors offer BaaS (Backend-as-a-Service) capabilities and claim their platforms are open because the customer can integrate the admin tools with any app development solution. However, if the platform doesn’t support porting, and if it can’t easily integrate with other tools, it isn’t truly open.
What a Truly Open Platform Looks Like
Here at appsFreedom, we feel strongly about providing solutions without lock-ins of any kind. We want our customers to have the freedom to integrate the apps you build on the appsFreedom platform with whatever third-party tool you already love or have determined would serve your business best. We also want our customers to be able to extend our platform to fit the specifics of your business needs. Finally, we want you to retain full control over your apps you build, including the option to port them to another platform.
Here are the key capabilities of appsFreedom that support the value we place on true openness:
BaaS for BYOT : Citizen developers can build apps with the solutions of their own choice, thanks to robust BYOT (Bring Your Own Tools) capabilities. There’s also no need to wait on the appsFreedom team to deliver the goods, because best of all, it can be done highly convincingly with the company’s internal IT staff in a highly secure and self-contained environment.
Extensions : Customers can augment the appsFreedom platform to fit the specifics of your distinct business requirements. The platform can integrate efficiently with any custom system, add business or integration logic or build any additional component : even if that platform overlaps with features offered by appsFreedom.
Doggie bags : When a subscription ends, customers are justifiably worried about migration or having to leave behind the apps they have built. appsFreedom allows customers to simply export all their apps, so they can be used with any tool which supports open standards.
As Future-Proof as Possible
To our knowledge, appsFreedom is the only platform that takes openness to a new level so as to give our customers maximized freedom of choice. Curious about just how open our open platform is? Get it touch with us today, and we’ll gladly review the specifics of your situation and share some advice on the platform that we believe makes the most sense for integrated, reasonably future-proof mobile enterprise apps.