Mobile in the enterprise iscrack. First, organizations got a little taste of it and liked the results. Now they crave more. And mobile developers are scrambling to hook them up.
Unlike consumers, enterprises tend to sample addictive new technologies warily. Smartphones and cloud services take months or years to integrate into the enterprise. Often they start in one department (like sales or accounting or IT) and then spread throughout the rest of a business. For instance, salespeople will adopt a customer relationship management (CRM) mobile app to help improve efficiency. The rest of the organization will see how well it works and make requests for their own mobile apps.
This is how the mobile imperative spreads through an enterprise—horizontally, worker to worker, rather than the top down. Whereas many organizations will have five to ten essential apps, there is need and desire to build dozens (or hundreds) to serveaspects of business functions. These apps are both for external, customer-facing purposes, as well as internal organizational purposes.
“Enterprises have had just a taste,” said IBM’s VP of mobile enterprise Phil Buckellew. “Mobility is moving into the rest of the enterprise.”
Developers Follow Suit
Startups and established technology companies alike are coming to realize the value of selling mobile solutions to the enterprise. The fact of the matter is that building apps for consumers is a very hit-or-miss business. And, as we have seen, building tools for mobile developers is a dicey proposition as well. Enterprise isthe money is and many developers have come to that realization over the last year. Instead of building the best new mobile social network (hello, Path), they are building apps for accountants, for salespeople, for IT gurus and administrators.
Once a quarter, Appcelerator surveys the developers who use its Titanium Studio integrated developer environment, or IDE, and other mobile tools. (It conducts the survey in association with research firm IDC.) In its most recent survey of 6,046 Titanium developers released today, Appcelerator saw a distinct increase in developers interested in building apps for the enterprise over the last three years.
Since the fourth quarter of 2010, enterprise-focused developers have risen 29.3% of Appcelerator's survey respondents to 42.7% in the second quarter of 2013. Developers primarily interested in consumer-facing apps have shrunk 70.7% to 57.2% in the same time period.
It is important to note that Appcelerator, as a company, has moved more into enterprise services in the last three years. A survey of its developers will likely reflect that change. At the same time, Appcelerator and its developer base are large enough to be indicative of mobile app ecosystem at large. (Appcelerator's Michael King, director of enterprise strategy, notes that Appcelerator does a separate survey focused on enterprise developers; this one targeted the mobile developer community at large.)
The bottom line: Enterprises need apps, are willing to pay for the creation and the service needed to maintain and integrate them.
Connecting Mobile To The Cloud
To serve the enterprise, developers need the tools necessary to provide integration and support for large organizations. These tools include thingsIDEs, continuous deployment, tracking and analytics, device and app management and security, strategy, consulting, design and cloud integration.
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