Summary Bullets:
- Most enterprises prefer PaaS offerings which include a mobile app platform component.
- Enterprises look to SIs as well as PaaS and MBaaS offerings to solve their backend integration challenges.
New research from Current Analysis, which polled 735 global enterprise respondents, proves that mobile app developers are demanding sophisticated new cloud services for solving their greatest integration challenges. The majority of respondents said having a combo hybrid/cloud configuration option was very to somewhat important (64%), with another 19% acknowledging this will be an important factor in the future. Enterprises are looking for a mix of on-premises, cloud and hybrid configurations in their development process.
PaaS with a mobile component: The majority of respondents said it is somewhat or very likely that they’d invest in an IaaS or PaaS solution, if it included a mobile app platform component (58%). This additional platform service lets developers take advantage of the scalability and self-service functions of the cloud, not to mention the radically reduced chore of having to procure hardware and software for their app development projects. Another almost 17% said the mobile component isn’t important now but will be going forward, indicating the majority of enterprises are already launching mobile development projects, with the minority following behind. Platform services offer the middleware stack along with the ability to speed and simplify the deployment of the provisioning process, including having elasticity. So the benefit comes from having the infrastructure required to develop and deploy enterprise applications with significantly increased ease and agility. Our research also showed that those industries placing the most importance on using platform services which included the mobile component were communications and utilities, transportation and distribution, and professional services.
Backend integration: In response to the challenges of backend integration between mobile apps and various data sources (with data sources including Oracle databases, SAP applications, e-commerce, and social networks), Current Analysis research shows that, overwhelmingly, developers have had to delegate the complex task to systems integrators. Interestingly, respondents also see a reliance on the services of MBaaS providers and PaaS providers as a secondary option for undertaking backend-as-a-service, with a relatively equal number listed for both those categories. Lately, Current Analysis has devoted a fair amount of focus via blogs and reports around the discussion of mobile backend integration, which currently represents the greatest enterprise mobile development challenge due to disparate and unconnected APIs from various data sources. The survey response is in line with our conjecture that in the next six to 12 months, we’ll see leading PaaS offerings include mobile backend-as-a-service capabilities to help DevOps with this development challenge.
On October 3rd and 4th, I and a few colleagues will deliver a webinar delving deeper into this comprehensive mobility research. In addition to app platforms issues, we will cover enterprise mobile security, infrastructure, and service providers.
IT Connection 