Enterprise mobility is big at the moment. In a recent survey conducted by IBM on 3 000 CIOs worldwide, mobility solutions emerged as the second highest priority for 74% of CIOs.
Looking at the local landscape, it is clear that mobility is rapidly moving up the priority list for most companies, both SME and enterprise. The big question that many decision-makers are asking is what their options are and what evaluation criteria they must use when making a decision.
Mobility is rapidly moving up the priority list for most companies, both SME and enterprise.
Arno du Toit is CCO of Virtual Mobile Technologies
There is a belief in the mobile space at the moment that companies have to make a choice between what mobile platform to support and what mobile technology to use. At the moment the major choices for platforms are iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, J2ME, Symbian, and soon, Windows Phone 7. The choice in mobile technology is between applications, mobile Web, USSD, SMS, and SIM.
All of the above options have a place in the market, and a good use case with both advantages and disadvantages.
Pros and cons
USSD is very good for single interactions on low-end devices, and can reach a broad range of devices. However, the provided interface is a basic text interface that may not sit well with users that are accustomed to the richness provided by other mobile technologies.
Mobile Web is good for discovering services, but not so nice for delivering services on mid-range devices. Data use is high and it is also difficult to secure over a large device base.
Applications are great for delivering services and can be very secure; however, it is challenging to reach the mid-range devices with apps, and device fragmentation makes it onerous to develop and maintain.
SMS/MMS is good for message delivery, but is probably the most expensive channel with limitations on multiple interaction and limited security.
Best of all worlds
The best possible case would be if there was an option to provide access to users over all mobile platforms and across all mobile technologies; a solution where the user decides how to interact with the company. This option does exist to some extent or another, depending on the platform, and is generally divided into two categories; either a mobile development platform or a mobile enterprise application platform (MEAP).
Mobile development platforms for the most part are focused on app store apps, and are not very concerned with enterprise requirements like integration, security, solution management and maintenance. These platforms are generally good for quickly developing an app store app, which runs on two or more mobile operating systems.
MEAPs provide an environment that enables a company to simultaneously extend products or services to more than one mobile technology and mobile operating system. MEAPs address the difficult task of integrating data centre services to mobile devices, providing secure access across a range of mobile technologies. In general, they only support the very high-end smartphones, but there are MEAPs that support mid-range (feature phone) and smartphone devices across all platforms and mobile technologies.
MEAPs are focused on complying with enterprise requirements and will adhere to security standards, integrations standards, and aims to fit into the general enterprise architecture. They aim to reduce the complexity of development for multiple platforms and ease the maintenance burden of supporting multiple platforms.
With an ever-growing mobile device base, MEAPs are a viable, safe option for enterprises looking to mobilise multiple products and services, with Gartner predicting that 95% of the world's organisations will standardise on a MEAP offering by 2012.
To sum up, not having to make a choice between mobile devices or mobile technologies now, or in the future, is the best possible scenario for going mobile, and provides the end-user with the most convenient mobile solution.
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