As the Enterprise Mobile Solution channel touched upon last week, apps are now being utilized to help enterprises increase their productivity levels and become more efficient in their daily operations. Now that mobility usage has begun to surge as companies are not only purchasing external apps to manage their business, now they are also building their own internal apps from scratch that are specifically tailored for their entity and no one else’s.
Why you may ask? To start off, mobile devices are giving enterprises the opportunity to liberate their employees from the desktop and instead capture their work at the same exact time it is being completed by utilizing the app. An example of that would be when Compuware, a provider of mobile solutions, recommended developing an iPhone (News - Alert) solution that gives fruit company Dole a tool that records the data it needs to capture certain characteristics in regards to fruit quality (photo of the fruit, location, quality, notes, and inspector name) and immediately send the data to a cloud service that aggregates it into a report. This solution was created as opposed to being manually inspected with fruit quality recorded onto paper and later updated via e-mail to the corporate HQ, which took more than 14 business days.
The BYOD program supported by most enterprises implies that employees will bring their own devices into the company with their own public apps and will have ability to potentially augment their device with the private enterprise app. A public app is one installed from an app store such as iTunes App Store or Google (News - Alert) Play where a certain level of app review has taken place. An enterprise app store is available on the inside of a companies’ firewall and does not require any review of hosted apps. In many ways, the enterprise app store is similar to a company Intranet vs. public Web (same technology, different access and controls).
However, there are many apps that companies would like to use with their employees – task management, survey collection, patient record review – that is applicable only to their enterprise and do not have a place in the public app stores. Any company that uses a private website is a candidate for these apps. The reason, according to Matthew David, chief digital strategist at Compuware, is that users are all moving away from their laptops and now want their data available on=the=go, just like Dole.
Compuware has built enterprise app stores for very large companies including technology leaders such as Dell (News - Alert), and its experience with app development and management will help enterprises be successful in their deployment of an enterprise app store.
For more information on how an enterprise can leverage its app building solutions and services, please visit Compuware.