interactive mobile applications in the enterprise: are you ready?
TRANSCRIPT
Interactive Mobile Applications in the Enterprise
Are you ready?
Matt Van BergenPrincipal, CTO
[email protected] x111
September 22, 2010
Abstract
Interactive mobile applications can serve your users and customers in ways that traditional web-based applications cannot. Interactive mobile applications enable you to have a consistent and ongoing interaction with your users, allowing them to be more engaged and committed to your service beyond what is possible with a mobile web browser.
Being an IT leader in your organization, you must be ready to field questions and, as necessary, build applications and infrastructure to support the wave of mobile applications which will likely be demanded by your marketing, sales, operations and customer service departments.
This webinar provides an overview of how you can prepare for the mobile application demands of your organization and customers.
Agenda
What are interactive mobile applications?
What’s all the fuss about?
Mobile applications and your organization
Top 5 ways you can prepare
Case Study: Extreme Scale Reference Mobile Architecture
How to be ready for your first mobile project
What is a mobile interactive application?
Reside on the mobile device connecting organizations of all types to employees and consumers through a variety of continuous, entertainment-like contextual experiences.
Browser-basedDevice installed
What’s all the fuss about?
Worldwide mobile app downloads will exceed 21.6 billion by 2013 (Gartner)
Revenue from U.S. mobile application downloads alone could reach nearly $1.6 billion in 2010 and would hit $11 billion in 2014 (WSJ)
Employees prefer a smartphone over a laptop as their primary mobile device for trips under 5 days.
Mobile applications are seen as key strategy of building an organization’s brand.
Mobile applications can provide a strategic advantage.
Mobile applications can be location aware and context aware.
Amazon sold over $1B via their iPhone App
eBay sold over $400M via their iPhone App
Mobile Applications and Your Organization
Marketing
• Mobile Advertising
• Game or trivia driven application
• Mobile coupons
• Cross selling
• Company information
Sales
• mCommerce
• Sales management
• Customer management
Customer Service
• Surveys
• Support request
• Location based search
Operations
• Executive dashboard
• Enterprise monitoring
How can you prepare?
1. Focus on building out a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA)
2. Learn about the “Cloud”
3. Understand the top mobile devices
4. Understand mobile app development strategies
5. Understand mobile-related security topics
Prepare Back-end Systems for the Ubiquitous Client
Establish a services oriented architecture initiative.
REST is the preferred method for mobile integration.
Design enterprise services as coarse grained services.
Secure services with SSL and Basic Authentication.
Be ready to scale if your services will be available to general public (Hint: see next slide if you have doubts).
Database
InternalApplication
InternalApplication
Database
Services Oriented Architecture
Internet
#1
“Cloudy With a Likelihood of Mobile”
Cloud computing platforms come in a couple different flavors:
• Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
• Software as a Service (Saas)
Pay for usage, no need to invest in costly hardware upfront.
Very important for consumer targeted mobile apps – scalability important.
#2
• In one month Shazam added
25 million users
• Britain’s Got Talent app added
200K users in first 4 days.
• Skype’s iPhone app attracted 5
million users in first few days.
Are you ready to scale for mobile?
Understand the various mobile devices and their platforms
iPhone OS iPhone OS Android OS BlackBerryOS
Symbian OS Windows Mobile
OS
• Will your mobile applications be supported by all of these devices?
• Are you going to limit the supported devices to only those that are “supported” by
your organization?
#3
Understand Cross-platform Mobile Development
Native Application Development
• Pros
• Best performance
• High interactivity (gaming)
• 100% support for device APIs
• Best chance for app store approval (Apple)
• Cons
• Not-portable between devices
• Can be steep learning curve
Cross Platform Development
• Pros
• Portable between most devices
• Leverages known technologies (HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, etc.)
• Installed just like a native app
• Cons
• Not sufficient for high interactivity (not yet)
• May not support all device APIs
• Sometimes risk in app store approvals (Apple)
#4
Understand Cross-platform Mobile Development (continued)
Platform Language Enterprise Known?
Portable?
iPhone Objective-C No No
Android Java (Dalvik VM)
Yes Maybe
BlackBerry Java (JME) Yes Maybe
Windows Mobile .NET and/or C++
Yes No
Nokia C++, Java, Flash, Web, Python
Yes Maybe
Palm Web Yes Yes
#4
Understand Cross-platform Mobile Development (continued)
Example Cross Platform Frameworks
• Develop using HTML5, CSS and Javascript
• iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian and
Palm support
• Use xCode IDE for iPhone, Eclipse IDE for
BlackBerry and Android, etc.
• Decent device feature support
• Develop using HTML5, CSS and Javascript
(Python, Ruby, PHP possible).
• More “nativeness” (
• iPhone, Android and BlackBerry support
• Proprietary IDE.
• Very good device feature support
Catch CITYTECH’s Jeff Schwartz’s presentation on PhoneGap at the
October 18th Mobile Monday Chicago user group meeting.
#4
Make security a first class citizen in your architecture
Security is the #1 concern for deploying mobile transactional applications (Entrust survey in April, 2010)
The end to end wireless communication chain is the most secure element in the entire mobile application value chain. The device application and user should be of focus.
Traditional username and password strategies are common but also very vulnerable. Two-factor authentication is gaining popularity.
Comprehensive auditing trail and alerting based on non-standard behavior.
Educate your users on security risks and new technologies as necessary
Leverage best practices learned from web application development
Don't persist sensitive data (unless you have to)
iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices provide remote “wipe” capability in case a mobile device is lost or stolen.
Beware of HIPPA, Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), Payment Card Industry (PCI), etc.
Develop flexible security policies
#5
Case Study: Extreme Scale Reference Mobile Architecture
Cross platform, native mobile application (iPhone, Android and Mobile Web)
Back-end services hosted on Amazon EC2
Distributed, Grid Based Architecture
• Massively scalable
• High performance
• In-memory storage
Technologies Used
• Red Hat JBoss InfiniSpan
• Red Hat JBoss AS
• Red Hat JBoss Modeshape
• Amazon EC2 Cloud
• Amazon S3 Cloud Persistence
• PhoneGap cross-mobile development framework
Your First Mobile Project
Start with a small project.
Consider the level of security required.
Leverage existing backend services that are available elsewhere in your enterprise – take abuilding block approach.
Know your users’ target mobile device(s)
Load test the backend services before going live (especially for a consumer mobile app).
Emphasize superior user experience
Matt Van Bergen
Chief Technology Officer
312-673-6433 x111
http://blogs.citytechinc.com/matt
http://twitter.com/mvanbergen
Web: http://www.citytechinc.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/citytech
Blogs: http://blogs.citytechinc.com
Contact CITYTECH to setup a no cost onsite needs assessment to see
how prepared your organization is for mobile interactive applications.
Professional Services: Specializing in the design, development and execution of highly available and scalable enterprise applications
Consultants: Average experience of 10 years
Offices: Located in downtown Chicago, IL
Goal: Strive for long-term partnerships with partners and clients
About CITYTECH
211 W. Wacker DriveSuite 1300Chicago, IL 60606