Excerpt page from:
Mobile Apps in the enterprise
Potentials and Pitfalls
 
 
13 April 2011 fiercemobileit.com April 2011 14 take that same information and reuse it in a B-to-B-to-C application. So for the Nissan Leap utilizing a MEAP platform and then having an application that allows the consumer to see a different set of information in a consumer-friendly way that allows them to control the vehicle—to lock and unlock the car doors, check energy or battery level in their vehicle. To this point it has been point-to-point, machineto- machine communications, and now once we have that connection to a particular machine or a piece of electronics there are a lot of different constituents who can use that information. The engineers are interested in how they can make a better car, the supply chain is interested in other information and then the consumer angle. FMIT : What advantage does AT &T have over some of the traditional enterprise vendors? Hill: It’s really being able to come to a customer and deliver an end-to-end solution and consulting along the way. They can have parts of the solution or we can deliver it fully on-net with AT&T assets from the devices, stocked or non-stocked. In the non-stocked category we have well over 1,000 devices we have certified through our labs so that we know if customers are looking for a ruggedized tablet, computer, we already have two or three of those certified, and here’s who we might recommend based on the information provided on the use case. We have our network and global roaming footprint and then the new area of serving up platforms, the software, the applications themselves. We just started at the end of last year with an acquisition (InCode) bringing in mobile integration capabilities. We have professional and managed capabilities that allow us to do staging and kitting, application and platform configuration and then we can host and manage that solution all within the AT&T data centers as well as tie in our cloud capabilities for on-demand storage and computing. FMIT : Do you find that enterprises trust mobile operators with all of this? Hill: As we continue to do customer surveys and work closer with research in this area, we are finding that greater than 50 percent of enterprises we are talking to actually prefer that set of services because these applications and devices are so mobile-centric and so tied to the network. We have an inherent subject–matter expertise in the behavior of these devices and applications in a mobile environment that is a very material and meaningful background in terms of designing the application and understanding online and offline, battery consumption and all of these different things that you don’t typically have to think about in deploying an enterprise application. FMIT : What are you seeing in terms of interest in customerfacing apps? Hill: As we look at customerfacing applications in the area I call mobile marketing, that is a little bit more nascent, but all of the tools are there. We just concluded a mobile marketing forum, and we’re discussing with a number of large enterprise marketing execs, there really are some fascinating things in terms of tying together mobile barcodes with these MEAP platforms, and then looking at network location so you can deliver contextually location-aware information in marketing to the individual, and tie that in with messaging aggregation so that you can have SMS. There are a number of different capabilities that have been used in pieces but are now being brought together in full solution portfolios. So, you can deliver a really differentiated consumer application and mobile marketing experience. Those are just starting now. Through this year and next year I think there will be an explosion in delivering advertising and marketing this way. l FierceMobileIT : What are the challenges enterprises are encountering this year and how will AT &T play an important role? Chris Hill: There are three things we are seeing in the marketplace, when it comes to the challenges enterprises are dealing with. First is that OS and device fragmentation is growing. It’s not diminishing, so that’s adding to the complexity of having to manage and think about deploying applications for enterprises internally and supporting B-to-C applications, without building up an entire IT department that would be managing the development of applications among a number of different OSes and device types. The other aspect of that is around the bring-your-own-device wave. Not only is it about having to manage applications within a corporate environment but also enterprises are looking at how to support their employees bringing their own device choices and types, and how they support those. The last challenge we’re seeing is folks starting to look at the way connected devices are going to transform the way they do business. So those would be three of the major themes in terms of what enterprises are coping with and the way we see AT&T play a significant role in helping them. So if we take the first category around OS and device fragmentation and supporting the app development and deployment, what we are looking at here is the utilization of an application platform, often known as MEAP in the industry—mobile enterprise app platform. It’s a fairly low-cost way to go in and be able to support a number of different OSes and the device abstraction as well as providing all of the backend connectors so that enterprises don’t have to do a whole lot of work on their backend integration. We have a best-in-class portfolio of the leading MEAP providers we are supporting and we are now providing integration and professional services around those solutions. So not only do we have the actual platform but we can then do the configuration and mobile integration of those platforms for our customers. Then we will look later on into this year at hosting and managing the platform for them. As of the fourth quarter, AT&T is the global leader in terms of connected device subscribers as we look across the marketplace. And this area has only just begun. When businesses are looking at what it means to connect their supply chain together, it’s not just internally. They are understanding, for instance, when a vending machine is out of a particular good that they need to tie that into a consumer application so that if a consumer is looking up a location of the nearest vending machine that has his favorite drink or food, it steers them to the right location. We just won an award at the Mobile World Congress around tying together vehicle telematics. That’s been around for a long time in terms of connecting the vehicle and having vehicle information and diagnostics back to the car OEM, but we’ve gone a step further to Q&A with AT &T’s Chris Hill on Enterprise Mobility By FierceMobileIT  Mobile operators are taking big steps to court the enterprise in the mobile apps arena. AT&T, which has proposed a $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile USA, has been busy building up its expertise. Its full suite of services range from mobile app development, to mobile device management, to hosted solutions. FierceMobileIT recently spoke with Chris Hill, AT&T’s vice president of advanced enterprise mobility solutions, about how AT&T wants to help enterprises take advantage of connected capabilities. We have a best-in-class portfolio of the leading MEA P providers we are supporting and we are now providing integration and professional services around those solutions. | Mobile Apps in the enterprise: Potentials and Pitfalls Page 7 | Apperian
13 April 2011 fiercemobileit.com April 2011 14 take that same information and reuse it in a B-to-B-to-C application. So for the Nissan Leap utilizing a MEAP platform and then having an application that allows the consumer to see a different set of information in a consumer-friendly way that allows them to control the vehicle—to lock and unlock the car doors, check energy or battery level in their vehicle. To this point it has been point-to-point, machineto- machine communications, and now once we have that connection to a particular machine or a piece of electronics there are a lot of different constituents who can use that information. The engineers are interested in how they can make a better car, the supply chain is interested in other information and then the consumer angle. FMIT : What advantage does AT &T have over some of the traditional enterprise vendors? Hill: It’s really being able to come to a customer and deliver an end-to-end solution and consulting along the way. They can have parts of the solution or we can deliver it fully on-net with AT&T assets from the devices, stocked or non-stocked. In the non-stocked category we have well over 1,000 devices we have certified through our labs so that we know if customers are looking for a ruggedized tablet, computer, we already have two or three of those certified, and here’s who we might recommend based on the information provided on the use case. We have our network and global roaming footprint and then the new area of serving up platforms, the software, the applications themselves. We just started at the end of last year with an acquisition (InCode) bringing in mobile integration capabilities. We have professional and managed capabilities that allow us to do staging and kitting, application and platform configuration and then we can host and manage that solution all within the AT&T data centers as well as tie in our cloud capabilities for on-demand storage and computing. FMIT : Do you find that enterprises trust mobile operators with all of this? Hill: As we continue to do customer surveys and work closer with research in this area, we are finding that greater than 50 percent of enterprises we are talking to actually prefer that set of services because these applications and devices are so mobile-centric and so tied to the network. We have an inherent subject–matter expertise in the behavior of these devices and applications in a mobile environment that is a very material and meaningful background in terms of designing the application and understanding online and offline, battery consumption and all of these different things that you don’t typically have to think about in deploying an enterprise application. FMIT : What are you seeing in terms of interest in customerfacing apps? Hill: As we look at customerfacing applications in the area I call mobile marketing, that is a little bit more nascent, but all of the tools are there. We just concluded a mobile marketing forum, and we’re discussing with a number of large enterprise marketing execs, there really are some fascinating things in terms of tying together mobile barcodes with these MEAP platforms, and then looking at network location so you can deliver contextually location-aware information in marketing to the individual, and tie that in with messaging aggregation so that you can have SMS. There are a number of different capabilities that have been used in pieces but are now being brought together in full solution portfolios. So, you can deliver a really differentiated consumer application and mobile marketing experience. Those are just starting now. Through this year and next year I think there will be an explosion in delivering advertising and marketing this way. l FierceMobileIT : What are the challenges enterprises are encountering this year and how will AT &T play an important role? Chris Hill: There are three things we are seeing in the marketplace, when it comes to the challenges enterprises are dealing with. First is that OS and device fragmentation is growing. It’s not diminishing, so that’s adding to the complexity of having to manage and think about deploying applications for enterprises internally and supporting B-to-C applications, without building up an entire IT department that would be managing the development of applications among a number of different OSes and device types. The other aspect of that is around the bring-your-own-device wave. Not only is it about having to manage applications within a corporate environment but also enterprises are looking at how to support their employees bringing their own device choices and types, and how they support those. The last challenge we’re seeing is folks starting to look at the way connected devices are going to transform the way they do business. So those would be three of the major themes in terms of what enterprises are coping with and the way we see AT&T play a significant role in helping them. So if we take the first category around OS and device fragmentation and supporting the app development and deployment, what we are looking at here is the utilization of an application platform, often known as MEAP in the industry—mobile enterprise app platform. It’s a fairly low-cost way to go in and be able to support a number of different OSes and the device abstraction as well as providing all of the backend connectors so that enterprises don’t have to do a whole lot of work on their backend integration. We have a best-in-class portfolio of the leading MEAP providers we are supporting and we are now providing integration and professional services around those solutions. So not only do we have the actual platform but we can then do the configuration and mobile integration of those platforms for our customers. Then we will look later on into this year at hosting and managing the platform for them. As of the fourth quarter, AT&T is the global leader in terms of connected device subscribers as we look across the marketplace. And this area has only just begun. When businesses are looking at what it means to connect their supply chain together, it’s not just internally. They are understanding, for instance, when a vending machine is out of a particular good that they need to tie that into a consumer application so that if a consumer is looking up a location of the nearest vending machine that has his favorite drink or food, it steers them to the right location. We just won an award at the Mobile World Congress around tying together vehicle telematics. That’s been around for a long time in terms of connecting the vehicle and having vehicle information and diagnostics back to the car OEM, but we’ve gone a step further to Q&A with AT &T’s Chris Hill on Enterprise Mobility By FierceMobileIT  Mobile operators are taking big steps to court the enterprise in the mobile apps arena. AT&T, which has proposed a $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile USA, has been busy building up its expertise. Its full suite of services range from mobile app development, to mobile device management, to hosted solutions. FierceMobileIT recently spoke with Chris Hill, AT&T’s vice president of advanced enterprise mobility solutions, about how AT&T wants to help enterprises take advantage of connected capabilities. We have a best-in-class portfolio of the leading MEA P providers we are supporting and we are now providing integration and professional services around those solutions.