Mobile Application and Cloud Strategies » Apps and Cloud in the Enterprise

Yankee Group shares analyst insights on industry news daily in our free Mobile Now e-newsletter. Our Directions reports review the insights from the past month and provide an overview of the trends we see emerging in the space. The mobile applications and cloud ecosystem certainly heated up in April, with a raft of interesting and important announcements. Mobile cloud momentum, enterprise vendors intensifying their mobility focus and mobile CRM all fell at the top of the bill.

In 2012, mobility escalated onto the C-level executive agenda as companies began to think about how to leverage it more strategically. Correspondingly, innovation in the vendor and service provider marketplace is heating up and promises to be one of the most hotly contested of all enterprise software markets in 2013.

HP Enterprise Services has announced it will be joining forces with SAP AG to deliver managed mobility services to clients. The services are intended to help the clients improve employee productivity with mobile apps and turn customer interactions into revenue opportunities.

SAP gathered executives in Frankfurt, San Francisco and New York City to announce the launch of SAP Business Suite on HANA. With this announcement, SAP is striking right at the heart of Oracle's Exadata Database and Exalytics In-Memory Machine. It is also vying to eliminate the need for data warehouses typically created using Teradata or IBM DB2. Most importantly, Business Suite on HANA creates a new foundation to address mobile applications—both speed- and processes-driven apps on all devices.

Enterprises still have not formulated workable mobility strategies for the most part, with the advent of consumerization and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) in the workplace bringing a new set of complex challenges. That's according to attendees of this week's 2012 Enterprise Mobility Exchange held in Rotterdam.

Citrix has elevated enterprise mobility to one of its six core strategic priorities and has moved quickly to build out basic capabilities into an enterprise mobility management (EMM) vision. However, it faces red hot innovation and intensifying competition to turn this promising vision into a market reality. 

India's second largest software firm, Infosys, has announced a partnership with SAP to deliver mobile apps throughout the country that will enhance retail sales.

The goal of Coca-Cola Enterprises is to get a Coke into consumers' hands, according to the company's vice president, Nick Collins. To move forward with emerging technologies, the company is beginning to turn toward mobile apps and advanced cloud services to improve its customer engagement.

Computing giant IBM has been spending 2013 shifting its focus toward mobility, and now the company is beginning to target enterprises and their mobility needs with its extension of its MobileFirst solution.

Good Technology knows enterprises are looking for better mobile apps, and that's why it recently unveiled seven new third-party apps optimized for the enterprise, including apps to edit Microsoft Office and Adobe files.

IBM is starting 2013 with a keen eye on enterprise mobility. The company recently announced a range of software and services is on the horizon to give enterprise IT an efficient and complete mobile software development lifecycle.

Android is on the rise now, but that picture will change in the enterprise by 2016

While native OS platforms such as Apple, Android and BlackBerry steer innovation in the mobile industry today, enterprises will put cross-platform toolsets in the mobile driver's seat by 2016.

Samsung's new KNOX solution significantly ups the mobility management stakes. As bring-your-own type programs take off in the enterprise, we see Samsung's momentum and growing ecosystem of partnerships sending a real shot across the bows of both BlackBerry and Apple.

Want to make an IT manager cringe? Ask her how the company's current mobile documents strategy--i.e., how mobile documents are being edited and viewed on smartphones and tablets--lines up with the corporate security policy.

Although Mobile World Congress (MWC) isn't usually overly enterprise-focused, MWC 2013 will be different. Workplace mobility is fast becoming a white-hot topic across the mobile ecosystem, especially now that enterprises are no longer trying to stop the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend and are instead focused on ways to develop and deploy mobile applications for more strategic effect. With enterprises on the precipice of their very own mobile applications gold rush, the potential marketplace is too big for anyone to ignore.

A new model for mobile cloud application development is emerging from a variety of mobile backend-as-a-service (MBaaS) providers that abstracts much of the traditional difficulty around backend integration and scalability into the cloud. What does it mean for enterprises?

Anyone tired yet of the debate as to whether HTML5, native or hybrid mobile app development is the best bet for enterprise applications? I am, primarily because it underplays the growing complexities companies face as they look to mobilize their workforces.

Enterprise vendors looking to make it big in the managed mobility space need to stop focusing on narrow wares like mobile device management (MDM) and start delivering holistic end-to-end enterprise mobility management (EMM) solutions--or watch the market pass them by.

Enterprise IT is completely rewriting the software rulebook as it shifts away from legacy systems and toward technologies that are increasingly user-centric, social, mobile and cloud-delivered. Vendors that don't make the transition now will fast become obsolete, losing their relevance in a multi-billion dollar market.