Interview: Mobile apps make rapid advance

Alison Henderson explains how enterprise mobility is recovering from earlier set-backs

Mobility has not lived up to its early high expectations, but things are beginning to change as technology is maturing and companies are starting to realise the potential of mobilising applications.

As director of UK operations for iAnywhere Solutions, the mobile arm of Sybase, Alison Henderson has seen enterprise mobility technology go through its hype phase, then disappointment and dismissal, before starting to be accepted again.

“Seven years ago, mobility was really going to take off. This was followed by a mini recession, and people found implementation was more complex than expected, and that devices had limited performance and low battery life,” she said.

Mobile deployments typically start off with email, then progress to mobilising an entire department or business unit. Here, scalability often becomes an issue, according to Henderson, if there are many workers all trying to sync with the central database simultaneously.

“We make most of our money from line-of-business applications, such as field service. We have customers that have been running large deployments for years, so we can demonstrate we are able to scale up. It’s a differentiator for us,” she said.

Henderson said that iAnywhere is working with the US Census Bureau to mobilise data gathering, a 500,000-seat deployment. Most deployments, however, are still single application rollouts across a department, typically a forms-based tool on a client device that is periodically synchronised with a main database. Some developers have gone down the web services route, but Henderson said that this approach falls down if workers go into areas where network connectivity is limited.

Henderson cited McDonald’s, which has mobilised its restaurant inspection teams. “In the US, they don’t have cellular coverage everywhere like we have. ­ Some inspectors can only connect once a week,” she said. The US employees were therefore given laptops, while European staff use handhelds, but both run the same application atop iAnywhere’s M-Business Anywhere suite.

Going forward, there are still challenges in mobilising applications. “A single developer environment would reduce the need to deal with every aspect of every device, while at the back-end, our goal is to create a single interface to all enterprise applications such as SAP. Right now, you need to be familiar with the API for each one,” Henderson said.

However, with today’s more capable and battery-friendly mobile devices, plus faster networks, enterprise mobility is finally taking off, according to Henderson.

“The rate of growth in the market is now significant. It’s still very complex, but we’re moving beyond single-application deployments,” she said. “Firms are now doing things that they couldn’t before. You can really see how it changes a business.”