With the ides of March, I enjoyed the opportunity to speak at Mobile Innovation Summit, the East Coast’s most strategic Enterprise Mobility event of the year. I was able to join senior mobile executives from companies like Bloomberg, Fidelity, Google, Groupon, and others on the main stage.
As a mobile strategy veteran and from the time I spent at the event, I’ve noted what I believe to be the biggest trends facing mobile innovation today:
Rapid Mobile Iteration: Several gurus discussed their newly evolved processes for building mobile apps, with an emphasis on prototyping and iterative development as 2016 objectives.
While in the past companies collected content, designed the experience, and then focused on the technology, they are now flipping the model. Companies are leveraging platform technologies to enable a quick backend development for common patterns of use cases and most likely integrations, so that quicker MVPs can be developed and continuously refined, as they incorporate feedback and address new needs.
Customer Experience Is... Transient Apps? Certainly consumers demand a superior user experience and user interface. But we’re hearing a shift in how they want to engage with a company. Gone are the days when a company has one giant app featuring all their brands and touch points, and here come newer experiences focused on the “workflow” of the consumer.
Companies should invest in mobile infrastructure services to enable scaling app development, versioning apps - for example to tailor for new products, regions, or specific events – and composite apps where multiple integrations work in concert to deliver a customer’s complete workflow without having to jump between multiple apps. These flows and events may change or expire, so your technology investments should support transient apps that enable you to deliver the best experience to your end user.
Enterprise-Grade: There was discussion on how companies will leverage mobile infrastructure services to accelerate development and enable more flexible and iterative development for the app front end… but pain points continued to be on the challenges with integration, security, mobile services, and deployment in a secure manner.
Gartner predicts that 80% of enterprise apps will leverage cloud backend services. But beyond a simple Parse-like offerings (#RIPParse) of cloud storage and deployment plus push notifications, enterprise companies should prioritize requirements for security, authentication, and app-specific user-roles, flexibility on deployment options, ease of enabling object modeling and business logic, and of course, enterprise connections and integrations to databases like SQL Server, Oracle DB, plus enterprise systems both on premise and cloud-based. Setting up quick integration kits and “pre-fab” back end code “widgets” allows front-end developers to quickly assemble a back end and then focus on their areas of UI expertise.
Over the past few years, I’ve seen AnyPresence’s Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) use cases evolve, from first simple acceleration to governance and now rapid iteration and innovation – all with the same underlying enterprise-grade assurance. But I am sure there’s much more in mobile innovation we have yet to see and I am excited to be a part of this evolving landscape!
If you’d like to learn more about use cases around MBaaS, check out how some of our customers are using our platform. You can also sign up for a free trial to see how AnyPresence might be a fit for your organization.