Mobilizing the Enterprise Quickly

There’s no doubt that mobile-enabling applications is the top priority for most IT organizations; not so much because employees want to use these devices but because mobile devices represent an opportunity for organizations to get much closer to their customers. The debate is no longer whether enterprise applications need to support these devices, but rather how best to go about it.

The most common approach being taken is the deployment of mobile application development platforms (MADP) that address everything from the development of the mobile application to how it securely accesses back-end services in the enterprise. But there is nothing simple about deploying and managing MADPs, which makes developing mobile applications a costly, time-consuming endeavor.

The folks at PowWow Mobile, however, contend that doesn’t necessarily need to be the case. In fact, PowWow Mobile CEO Andrew Cohen said there is no need for MADPs at all. PowWow Mobile makes use of what Cohen describes as a patented Deconstruct/Transform/Reconstruct (DTR) process to mobile enable an existing enterprise application without having to rewrite any business logic.

Cohen said PowWow first deconstructs the application, breaking it into its component pieces, while preserving all the business logic and back-end integrations. Cohen said PowWow then reconstructs the transformed components into an application that runs natively on a mobile platform in a process that takes about 10 days. As an example of that process, Cohen noted PowWow Mobile already enables enterprise applications to run on the Apple Watch.

When it comes to mobile computing IT organizations clearly are under severe pressure. Line-of-business unit leaders have made it clear they want to try and establish a closer relationship with customers by having an actual physical presence of on their smartphones and tablets. Those LOB executives not only are painfully aware competitors are racing to achieve that same goal, they also realize some new upstart in their industry will make use of mobile computing applications to usurp them. After all, every day there is yet another example of how a mobile application is being used to “Uber” some company or another out of existence. But currently it takes internal IT organizations months, sometimes even years, to develop an actual application. Worse yet, once the application is developed, all the company's compliance and security controls then must be applied.

The opportunity for solution providers, of course, is to start a conversation with those organizations about how to accelerate that process in a way that enables them to establish a presence on mobile computing devices much sooner than what is already being perceived as being too late.