Why Enterprises need a Mobile First strategy?

Mobility remains the top priority for most of the enterprises.  Enterprises want to enable mobile work force in order to increase their employee productivity and thereby ensure smooth operations.   Also enterprises are looking to connect to customers through mobility.

Market analysis firm Gartner in its report is optimistic in forecasting that 25 percent of enterprises will have their own individual app store by the year 2017.

While the applications are being mobile enabled, enterprises need to design and build a strategy for developing and managing mobile apps over the long run.  The apps that need to go mobile have to be identified and aligned based on the business needs and then a solution needs to be architected to fit the enterprise.  However with the changing mobile market, where newer versions of operating systems are being released, it is a great challenge for the enterprises to come up with a sound mobile strategy.

BYOD – A threat or a challenge?

Consumerization of IT has led the way to BYOD concept as a result of which the enterprises are under pressure to strengthen their security policies. According to InformationWeek 2013 Mobile Security Survey, 68% support bring your own device in some form, and an additional 20% are in the process of developing BYOD policies.

With the growing popularity of BYOD, enterprises need to ensure the security of user owned devices which lead to Mobile Device Management (MDM). Gartner says, 89% of all organizational IT departments world wide support BYOD.  Early adopters are financial services, hospitality, Media and Entertainment and Infrastructure players

Alternatively, few enterprises are also adopting virtualization technology to bring about a concept similar to BYOD which is called as COPE (Corporate Owned Personally enabled). Enterprises find this concept more manageable because the devices are owned by the company and not the individual.

Where to find the right skills?

According to Gartner, CIOs say the top challenges for IT teams developing mobile applications are collaborating across departments and finding IT professionals with the skills to build them.

Skills are becoming hard to find because of the rapidly evolving mobile market.  Newer versions, newer frameworks and tools, increasing need for cross compatibility across platforms are some of the challenges the IT departments of Enterprises have to face.  This complex market is in turn delaying their mobile efforts.  But timing is very essential to the success of mobile application in order to crash the time to market.  So the Enterprises are engaging vendors for overcoming their mobile development challenges.  However, the strength of vendors varies widely in the market.  So it is important to choose a vendor who can offer a broad range of services and innovative pricing.  More importantly, the vendor should have future road map in this space so that they can cover all the enterprise mobility needs.

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