Significant growth is forecast in the use of Smartphones worldwide. With this growth in Smartphone use comes an increase in the consumption of mobile applications.
Many businesses have already jumped (or are in the process of jumping) onto the mobile development bandwagon to take advantage of the opportunities and innovation that mobile applications can deliver. Take Dominos Pizza for example. Dominos embraced mobile as a way to enable customers to place orders, and now has more than 30% of their orders placed online or from their smartphone app.
Failure to have a well-considered mobile strategy could make or break business, so it’s important to get it right. One consideration that is gaining momentum at the moment is Mobile Platform as a Service – or a “Mobile Enterprise Application Platform” (MEAP). The MEAP term was originally coined by Gartner, and is a serious alternative to developing bespoke mobile apps. MEAP’s offer fast development, and can be delivered across multiple platforms without the need to re-engineer code. In other words, companies can use a MEAP to develop the mobile application once and deploy it to a variety of mobile devices (including various smart phones, tablets, notebooks, handhelds etc) with no changes to the underlying business logic. This makes it easy to align with your BYOD strategy. MEAP’s can be made available in online and offline mode, and are great for organisations who wish to deploy multiple applications on a single infrastructure.
So, who should consider MEAP as part of their mobile strategy ?
Gartner developed a concept called “the rule of three”, where they encourage companies to consider the MEAP approach to mobility when they need their mobile solutions to:
- Support three or more mobile business applications
- Support three or more mobile operating systems (OS)
- Integrate with at least three back-end data sources
I am currently in the process of sourcing trusted Australian based MEAP providers. If you know of any, I would greatly appreciate if you could get in touch.
Ben Ward 
Jamie Harrison
August 25, 2012 at 12:43 am
Hi Ben,
I’m interested to know your take on mobile strategy in general. Do you see mobile strategy as becoming critical to business competitiveness and success or more that the consumerisation of I.T means that a certain level of capability should be provided to staff\clients to fulfil the growing demand for it?
health-e-cio
August 27, 2012 at 9:09 am
Thanks Jamie,
In my view, having a robust mobile strategy will be critical for many organisations to remain competitive and develop competitive advantage. A good mobile strategy will leverage consumerisation of IT to further enhance the delivery of products and services.