API Development

Enterprise mobile apps: Challenges and Strategies

Enterprise mobile apps: Challenges and Strategies

Mobility has changed business forever.  The future of enterprise tech lies in apps and largely mobile apps that deliver the same functions across virtually every platform for mobile devices, desktops and online. Mobile is the center of digital transformation but yet it is challenging to build and launch a mobile app which will be successful and widely adopted.
So what are some of the challenges to build an Enterprise mobile solution?

  1. Fragmentation of devices, multiple operating systems, form factors
  2. Development time, effort and budgets are multiplied leading to high cost of mobile solution ownership.
  3. Secure Backend integrations

Learn below how some enterprises addressed these challenges and launched successful mobile applications that improved productivity, raise the level of customer engagement and help their businesses get the most out of their mobile app.
1/ Fragmentation of devices and multiple operating systems leading to huge development costs and efforts:
Due to the lack of support for automated migration across platforms, developers have to redesign and implement most of the application for every single platform to achieve the native look and feel. Therefore, creating quality products across platforms is not only challenging, but also time consuming and costly. Developing mobile apps across platforms natively is like having a set of different developers per each platform as a result, re-coding against wildly different API sets increases the cost and time-to-market within phases of design, development, testing, and maintenance, which is definitely a large issue for most of the companies.
Belgium based leasing company VAB Fleet services, caters for the needs of commercial vehicle fleet owners and is responsible for uniform, efficient and correct collection of end-of-lease vehicles. One of the growing challenges for VAB was to conduct damage assessment for end-of-lease fleet vehicles located outside national borders while cutting operational overhead associated with frequent travel of appraisers.
The company’s Mobile team used Axway Appcelerator’s cross platform mobile app development solution for this project, which allowed them to easily select building blocks from their previous project (iPhone application) and use them for the new solution (iPad application). Without a cross-platform solution, any effort to create the solution would have to have started from scratch. With Axway Appcelerator mobile solution, VAB was able to eliminate cost of frequent travel and associated paperwork, cut development time for new mobile apps, anticipate errors before they occur and lower total cost of solution ownership. Click here to learn more about this MADP implementation.
2/ Secure mobile backend integrations
To provide real business value, enterprise apps require integration with the company’s back-end systems so that relevant information can be viewed and updated in real time. And security becomes highest concern for IT teams working with back-end integrations. A mobile app security breach not only affects the users/customers that have been compromised, it can have a deep impact to a company’s brand reputation and it will destroy user/ customer confidence and loyalty.
A large company in France who manage more than 80% of the electricity distribution network in the country had a goal to create new mobile experiences for their employees and customers that can deliver data in a secure and dynamic way through multiple channels: API platforms, mobile applications and application stores.
They evaluated different vendors and decided to go with Axway who helped them to securely externalize customer information to their mobile solution.  The solution involves cloud services that provide ability to remove sensitive data from mobile devices themselves and store them in secure file and database servers.
With the (VPC) Virtual Private Cloud option, the services are deployed in a public cloud, but use dedicated infrastructure, wrapped in a VPN for private access to a particular company. Services are deployed in a private data center and can take advantage of internal security practices already in use within an organization.
The company is now be able to offer “Monthly Online Electric Statements” to customers and public regulation entities, thus providing more efficient and quicker customer service without a security breach.
Conclusion:
Enterprise apps are an exciting prospect with enormous potential for almost every organization. They offer new and better ways to accomplish tasks, increase efficiency and productivity, and create better engagement for employees and customers. But they present a challenge. If they don’t function well or meet the needs of users, they risk alienating employees and executives. Keep in mind the suggestions above to ensure you’re on the right track to a successful app strategy.