What Is the Customer's Pain?

Companies seeking to implement a mobile solution face numerous application infrastructure challenges. First, they must assess the current state of their IT capabilities to determine the likelihood of leveraging their existing information systems' investments. Second, they must determine whether to build, buy, or lease capabilities that extend their existing systems for access and use by their customers, suppliers, and employees. In addition, they must figure out how to deliver new functionality without spending millions on consultants, contractors, and redesign costs.

For companies just coming off e-business implementations, call it the applications nightmare, part deux. Most executives understand that technological and process innovations are only minimally useful if businesses cannot properly align the software applications and infrastructure on which these innovations depend. They also understand the business value of implementing a low cost of ownership mobile infrastructure to serve as a foundation for introducing sophisticated applications in the future. The big unknown is navigating the uncharted waters of mobile application infrastructure to get from the current state to the mobile vision.

To help companies build mobile solutions, an entirely new category of companies is emerging. The purpose of this category is to facilitate the creation of a new class of mobile, yet scalable, secure, mission-critical enterprise applications. The goal of this software category is to provide the building blocks that take the magic and cost out of building mobile applications. In the past, Fortune 50 companies such as Pepsi, UPS, and FedEx developed mobile applications in-house at a cost of hundreds of million of dollars. Companies such as these can now buy third-party products and roll out a complete mobile solution in months, not years.

For telecommunications carriers like Verizon Wireless to build new mobile applications-messaging, portals, or m-commerce-on top of their legacy infrastructure will take years of effort and millions of dollars. So they turn to companies such as Openwave Systems that provide an application platform with prepackaged components. The carriers then use this platform to develop customized applications.

Before application platforms, telecom companies had to either build everything from scratch or assemble multiple technologies in order to deliver mobile solutions such as messaging. This approach meant devoting significant resources to the integration and testing of wireless connectivity, mobile databases, synchronization packages, middleware, and application management software.

The resulting custom-built infrastructure possessed an inherent fragility. A minor change by any of the underlying components meant spending additional time, money, and effort on reassembling and retesting the entire application infrastructure. As a result, a constant challenge was stabilizing the custom infrastructure instead of delivering new mobile applications that addressed new customer needs.
The telecommunications companies are not unique. Similar problems exist in other industries. In order to deploy mobile applications, enterprises have to invest in mobile application platforms capable of bridging three constituencies: legacy/existing enterprise software, multiple network operators, and Web-enabled mobile devices. Also, these mobility platforms must bridge multiple networks, operating systems, and coding protocols-not an easy task.

Given this scenario, most corporate IT departments simply lack the resources or expertise needed to navigate the new and treacherous waters of mobility solutions. IT managers are looking to determine which application platforms, business models, and vendors are the ones to invest in for the long haul. In effect, they are struggling to define a mobile infrastructure roadmap.

Want more info? Read Types of Mobile Inrastructure.