While I have known of Global Bay for quite some time, I only met Sandeep a few months ago. All I can say is that when I first met him, we spent as much time laughing as talking about enterprise mobility. Somehow, that seems to have become a pattern every time I speak to him. That makes working that much more fun. I sat down with Sandeep last week - check it out after the jump.
Enterprise Mobility Matters: Hi Sandeep. Thanks for taking the time to chat today. There’s a growing debate around developing stand alone mobile applications or using a middleware solution. Which approach in your opinion is best and why?
Sandeep Bhanote: The decision to leverage a mobile middleware solution (i.e., platform) versus a point solution depends on what your mobile strategy is. You really have three choices:
- Depending on your need, and if there is a point solution that fits your need, you should explore the possibility of buying it.
With this option, you will have the fastest time to market, however you may not have the option to really customize this solution. To some degree, your business process may have to adjust to the limitations of what this application can do. This should be the way to go if your organization has a singular need for mobility and a low budget.- Develop your application in house. Personally, I think this is a very bad idea. Mobility is a tricky thing, and frankly, there are a handful (yes I really mean a handful) of people out there that truly understand how to do this. Let me walk you through what I mean.
When you custom develop a mobile application, there are two basic fundamentals you need to have:
- Technical understanding of how mobility should work (ie off-line vs on-line, etc), synchronization, data storage, integration, nuances of device behavior, etc. This is what I call the plumbing. If you don’t get this right, all bets are off.
- The experience (which you cannot get by reading on-line wikis or taking a two-day crash course!) in building applications and understanding the wide-array of use cases in which you need to account for when building out your application. I guess the effort (time and money) spent to figure this all out vs. the benefit of actually getting this to work may not be worth the ROI.
- Leverage mobile middleware products. There are a few of these out there. These solutions all solve a problem well albeit differently. The only reason you want to take this approach is if you are an organization that has many different mobility needs and you want to manage that with one solution.
For example, let’s say you are an organization that has different lines of businesses, each with its own field work force and respective business process. What a mobile platform will do here is remove the ‘plumbing’ from the equation and let you focus on the business process. Instead of focusing on technology, these tools will let you focus on the user interface, workflow, validation and back-end integration.
Ultimately reducing development risk and integration challenges you will exponentially increase your time to market with success!
EMM: I’m sure you heard about the MSFT partnership with Nokia for Office Mobile, etc. What’s your take on it? Is this good for Windows Mobile?
SB: This is really not going to matter. You have Microsoft that is desperately trying to maintain some level of relevancy in the mobile market and Nokia who is trying to expand it’s reach to the mobile professional.
The only thing that can be "good" for Windows Mobile is a complete redesign of its OS. In fact what they should do is the following: Take the "stack" back and own the OS, Hardware and only support C++ as the language for development.
EMM: With HTML5 and "The Cloud" getting so much buzz these days, where do you see their impact on enterprise mobility?
SG: HTML5 has some interesting new features like off-line support and etc. It has potential in making it easy to develop mobile applications and opportunity for folks to create non-sophisticated consumer-grade applications very easily. However I do NOT believe that this will replace the need for native applications on devices.
The Cloud is GREAT for mobility. I think one of the biggest challenges for enterprise mobility is managing the infrastructure and scale of a solution. This offers a low-cost alternative to the problem.
EMM: What’s the most important piece of advice you can give a CIO when s/he considers deploying a mobility solution?
SG: Here are my top three pieces of advice:
- Spend time on identifying a strategy. Some of the questions that form this strategy can be: Do I need mobility? Why? Who benefits?
- Pick a problem that can be easily addressed and measured. I am a big fan of measuring success. You don’t need to boil the ocean here.
- Do not LEAD with the device first.. That should be one of the last things you think about.
EMM: In your view, where does Application Management fit into the mobility management equation?
SG: If we are talking about mobility management, Application Management is core to this. Blackberry and Apple do this well, and I think others will follow suite. For example, Verizon just announced a managed service provided by iAnywhere. I think you will see more of this over time.
EMM: How do you see the economy impacting mobility in the enterprise? When are we going to see an upturn in the (our) market?
SG: I think the market is forcing mobile enterprise providers to verticalize. I think the days of be “all things to all people” is over. There are some of us out there who have figured this out and are doing quite well in this economy. Next year will be a huge year. I am excited! .
EMM: One last question Sandeep. Microsoft’s Danger group had an infamous data loss this past week. What does this say about mobile cloud computing?
SG: First of all stuff happens. Google’s mail service went down earlier this year and was covered by the news. But you know what? People still use it.
With regards to data loss, I defer to my point earlier. You need to have people that know what they are doing when it comes to implementing mobility. This is a lesson I am sure has left some deep battle scars for the folks at Microsoft. I am pretty sure this will not happen again – but don’t quote me on this!
How this will affect mobile cloud computing is unclear. Personally, I don’t think it will. We will see teething issues with this and over time it will be fairly reliable.
Thank you Sandeep for taking the time to chat with me today. If interested, you can connect with Franck on LinkedIn here. Do you know anyone who should be a guest here on Inside Looking Out? Drop me a line.
