A key benefit of implementing a mobile solution is that the business remains buffered from the complexities of wireless security, data transmission, billing, and device management. This is increasingly critical as devices, networks, and user requirements proliferate. We are already faced with a staggering set of choices when doing simple tasks, such as activating phones, selecting service plans, and procuring and provisioning new devices.
Those will continue to be complicated decisions, but they’ll pale in comparison to mobile application-related decisions. Mobile application design decisions spawn a complex set of decision trees — for example, alerting paths should be optimized by schedules, incident priority, and network bandwidth. For these reasons, effective mobile applications isolate users from the complexities of mobility. The same resources that administer PC applications must be able to also administer their mobile equivalents.
A simple illustration shows the trend we’re all experiencing firsthand: today, a Google search for “mobile enterprise software” returns more than 90 million results. In 2009, it returned a fraction of that amount. By 2012, it will likely return significantly more than it does today. Expect not just more mobile applications, but also more complicated apps accessed by increasingly powerful devices. And expect to support them with the same or fewer resources than you have today.
By BMC Software