The 9th post in a series about how mobile apps will be used as productivity tools in the enterprise, and how these apps will be securely distributed and managed.
The Enterprise App Center
The success of Facebook, the iPhone and the iPad has driven the evolution of ‘the Web as operating system’ at least 10 years earlier than originally forecasted. The emergence of this phenomenon is the single most significant technology development to affect business since the PC, and it will dominate computing well into the future.
The Web as operating system is the new architecture of applications, replacing the old way of installing a single client application onto a computer with the remote download of an app from a distribution platform. Consumer software has transformed from being distributed by a floppy disc, a CD, and a download from an FTP site to a lightweight app downloaded from the Internet.
Mobile apps will drive the evolution of enterprise application software. Software that was written over the span of a year and shipped as a maintenance upgrade or sold as a download will be replaced by a collection of apps with small amounts of custom code for broadly-based solutions. A typical full-fledged and dedicated application may be broken down to its molecular functions, with each one offering one or two percent of the total functionality of the original application. In other words, the myriad of functions available in a mature enterprise application will be deconstructed into its sub-functions that are easily installed as downloadable apps from an enterprise app store or center.
Mobile Apps will be developed, distributed, and managed in an Enterprise App Store or Center
In effect, every major organization in the world that maintains a firewall and a proprietary repository of content will be compelled to create a private cloud apps environment. This will include on-premise cloud services with an app center available to all internal consumers. These self-service kiosks will be developed to provide a set of very personalized apps unique to each organization, department, or business unit. This will give rise to an entirely new industry based on the requirement to manage enterprise apps called Enterprise Application Management, or EAM.
As the ECM market evolves, EAM describes the development of a new set of tools that will be required to manage content inside the firewall within the mobile app development environment. This set of tools will enable enterprise IT departments to manage an enterprise app center. EAM will bring new challenges for the enterprise as mobile apps proliferate into the enterprise cloud and new formats of digital media emerge to be shared in ways not yet conceivable today.
Read Part 1 in the series.
Read Part 2.
Read Part 3.
Read Part 4.
Read Part 5.
Read Part 6.
Read Part 7.
Read Part 8 in the series.
