The world is divided. On one side are enterprise applications. On the other are mobile apps. Yet one day soon, they are likely to merge.
Right now, enterprise application developers struggle with the notion of mobile versions, and they struggle because no end users really need an entire ERP or CRM application on their smartphones and tablets. If they only mobilize part, it may be the right part for employee 1 at company A but the wrong part for employee 2 or for company B.
Then there’s navigation. What might be easy to navigate on a desktop or laptop is a nightmare on a mobile device. And what may be an entire ecosystem in the office becomes an impenetrable clot on a smartphone.
Mobile application development software companies think they have the answer – create standalone mobile apps that duplicate the existing enterprise application functionality that mobile users need most. That works until those needs evolve… or fabulous new features in the enterprise version can’t be accessed in the mobile one.
At the moment, the simplest way to migrate enterprise applications to mobile environments and give mobile users the kind of usability and integration they need is to connect selectively to the enterprise resources that are already there — not create a new layer of standalone apps that duplicate existing functionality.
That sort of individualization gives users and groups exactly what they need… along with the flexibility to modify capabilities in minutes, reduced sets of menu choices for faster navigation, and even combined functionality and data from multiple enterprise applications, all wrapped into a simple mobile workflow.
The way Webalo accomplishes this doesn’t involve discrete apps at all – just direct connections to the enterprise so there’s nothing additional to manage and maintain. Whether those enterprise applications are on-premise like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, or in-house applications or in the cloud like Salesforce.com doesn’t matter.
But… all of this may soon be antiquated. Apple combines MacOS and iOS features and functions with each new version and, for all intents and purposes, Microsoft’s Windows 8 has created a seamless operating environment that works the same on a smartphone as it does on a desktop.
As both systems evolve (possibly joined by the marriage of Google’s Android and Chrome environments), the days of separate software versions – one for desktops and laptops, another for mobile devices – may be coming to an end. And Webalo’s essentially there: any enterprise application that runs under Windows 8 on a desktop or laptop can, using Webalo, be connected directly to mobile devices running Windows 8 and function identically – even if the mobile version is configured (again using Webalo) to include less functionality because that’s all a particular user or group might need.
Some organizations, including some of our customers, design new applications by determining their mobile employees’ needs first and then work backwards from the mobile app to the custom-built in-house enterprise application. As the operating systems merge, it may not matter where new software starts or ends. All that will matter is that it delivers the data and functions it’s supposed to. After that, it can be easily made to run anywhere.
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