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Is Mobile Taking the Lead?

The race for Enterprise mobility is fast catching up on the race for enterprise availability on desktop browsers. Even before information system vendors and corporate IT departments have got to grips with the security, performance and compatibility issues of the browser architecture, their sights have already shifted to conquering the world through mobile devices.

This mobile mania has nothing to do with gaming apps or social networks, but rather a change in corporate and B2B trends.  An example of this is BYOD - bring your own device - a recent paradigm shift rooted in a clearly defined infrastructure to improve business workflows and save big money in the process.

In 2011 5% of enterprise custom applications were available on mobile devices. Industry analysts predict this will rise by almost threefold, bringing the market share to 13% by 2015. Non-mobile SaaS apps are expected to increase their share by a far more moderate one and a half times over the same period.

Enterprise Needs and Challenges

Large corporations' demands of mobile information systems are primarily focused on data security, speed of development, ease of deployment across the organization and costs. The latter is split into software maintenance and development on the one hand and infrastructure running costs on the other, which can vary enormously between different technological solutions.

Most enterprise software for mobiles until now has been distributed in the form of a downloadable application. Perceived by some as being higher performance and better integrated with local device resources than a browser architecture, this approach is restrictive from a cross platform point of view due to different proprietary operating systems - a problem familiar to developers in the desktop environment. Mobile runtime apps additionally suffer from clumsiness and complication of deployment requiring downloading and installation.

High resolution touch panels, with their finger control capabilities, high data transfer infrastructures and far more compatible browsers have now made mobile web apps a far more interesting way to deliver a business application to a mobile or tablet device. Acceptance of mobile web apps has been accelerated by new technologies such as PhoneGap that enables client resource integration, richer tools to develop the client side leveraging common JavaScript knowhow and more. However, getting cloud or web applications to work well on mobiles is not just an issue of page format. The age-old market rivalries, computing platform wars and the Babylonian lack of common language between operating systems and browsers started off even worse in the mobile browsing world, where plug-ins have been all but outlawed. The good news is that Apple's i/OS and Android, the leaders in this particular market, seem to have set a new standard for compatibility - HTML5.

HTML5 to the Rescue

The last year has seen a surge in HTML5 development and the reason is not hard to find. Native mobile controls, video formats and other built in functionality previously left to scripting and plug-ins has put HTML5 squarely on the developer's table.  Reinforced by Microsoft's surprise declaration in 2011 that the Windows 8 / Metro will be based on HTML5 / JavaScript development, over 60% of enterprises will be writing in HTML5 by the end of 2013.

HTML5 and the .NET Toolkit

The world of enterprise information systems is still dominated by Microsoft-based software, estimated at 70% of the market share and incorporating millions of developers worldwide. A number of challenges stand before.NET development managers and programming personnel; already under pressure to deploy their existing systems over the internet, maintain them and write new systems, their task load has now been increase with the call to make their systems available on mobile devices and tablets too.

IT managers expecting to find development tools in the Microsoft environment, that will give them an easy path to the mobile world, will find that those dev tools cannot be found in their standard MS toolkit. To build a mobile enterprise application to work on tablets or mobile phones, they face the prospect of engineering their own security methodology and learning the intricacies of browser programming with a very different client-server data binding techniques to those they are familiar with in Visual Studio.

Visual WebGui EnterpriseMobile

In 2012 Gizmox, the creator of Visual WebGui, a .NET-based form-driven development environment, released a mobile version of their flagship product. It takes the approach of post-PC, drag and drop enterprise development for the web and deploys it as a web application for mobile devices, maximizing their benefits and usability as a business tool. 

It is, to date, the most mature and complete HTML5 development tool for .NET mobile applications. It's a visual drag-and-drop form designer with a cross-platform HTML5 rendering engine, it is form-factor and device-aware and has a single code base for cloud, web and mobile implementations. Mobile-specific events and actions handled include finger swipe, animated transitions (flyins) and gestures.

That makes EnterpriseMobile a powerful means for handling and even promoting the change in the organization towards a BYOD culture.

Further enhancements expected over the coming months include migration capabilities from VB6 and .NET desktop enterprise systems, PhoneGap and Citrix Receiver support for linking up with  device resources, offline working capability and built-in skins and themes.

Such a solution would allow them to leverage the existing workforce and its skillset and get down to the business of writing mobile enterprise software. 

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