Red Hat Pushes Mobile App Dev Into The Cloud

At the Red Hat 2015 Summit this week Red Hat (RHT) unfurled an instance of its mobile application development platform (MADP) that can now be invoked as a cloud service along with a mobile computing alliance with Samsung Electronics America.

Based on technology that Red Hat gained when it acquired the FeedHenry mobile backend-as-a-service (MBaaS) software last year and Red Hat OpenShift platform-as-a-service (PaaS) software, Red Hat this week also revealed that the core FeedHenry MBaaS software would later this year become an open source project.

In addition, Red Hat also announced that OpenShift Enterprise 3, a next generation PaaS environment that supports Docker containers and open source Kubnernetes orchestration software alongside virtual machines is now generally available.

Cathal McGloin, vice president of mobile platforms for Red Hat, says after a year of work Red Hat is now ready to make a Red Hat Mobile Application platform available as an OpenShift Online cloud service. The next big challenge, says McGloin, is educate enterprise IT organization about how to invoke MBaaS platforms to better integrate mobile applications based largely on application programming interfaces (APIs) with backend enterprise applications and services.

Clearly, mobile and cloud computing are two sides of the same coin. Mobile applications need to be able access cloud services to be of any real use. The challenge, said McGloin, is that the rate at which enterprise IT organizations are embracing mobile applications varies widely. More challenging still, there’s not much industry consensus yet concerning the role MBaaS platforms play in enabling those mobile applications to be built, deployed, managed and, just as importantly, secured.

Naturally, there’s a lot of competition to provide those services. Red Hat is betting that not only will an open source software approach carry the day, but that a massive ecosystem of IT services will also soon emerge around mobile application development in the cloud.

Of course, the biggest issue solution providers across the channel may have to contend with is finding enough expertise to actually take advantage of this opportunity. While there are plenty of, for example, JavaScript developers, for example, the number of IT operations people with MBaaS expertise is fairly limited. For that reason alone leveraging MBaaS software delivered via the cloud not only makes a lot of economic sense; the simple truth of that matter is that it might only be the truly viable option available given the general shortage of IT operations with actual mobile application expertise.