Cisco’s Intuitive Network Demands Much More than App and Infrastructure Unification

Brad Shimmin – Research Director, Business Technology and Software

Summary Bullets:

• Cisco’s recent marketing campaign around “The Network Intuitive” calls for a radical rethink of the network where programmability, artificial intelligence (AI), and transparency point toward a self-aware infrastructure driven by business outcomes.

• But for that to work, for Cisco to help companies at last bridge the seemingly intractable rift that exists between IT and business concerns, the company will need to help its customers reimagine how apps are built.

It doesn’t matter if you run your enterprise app in the cloud or on premises, whether those apps are containerized, or if they adhere to a modern development paradigm (agile, RAD, et al.). Inevitably, each and every one will reveal what is perhaps the industry’s longest standing challenge — unifying IT and business. The app will go down; a database error will occur, client software will slow, or worse still the app may fall prey to a security breach or attack. And that’s when the finger pointing starts between development, IT, service provider, integrator or VAR, et al. Eventually the root cause of the problem will present itself, but in the meantime, reputations are sullied and money is lost.

Recent Mobile Acquisitions Remind Enterprises to Look for Vendors That Have Invested in MEAP

Charlotte Dunlap

Summary Bullets:

• Mobile platforms signal success for enterprise application platforms vendors
• Case in point: This week, Antenna Software was snatched up by Pegasystems

Two recent MEAP acquisitions were prompted by the need to fill out current portfolios in a sure-fire area of technology, and nothing spells success faster than the acquisition of mobile technology. Because time to market is everything, those involved in application platforms are realizing they cannot get up to speed in mobile platforms overnight and are wise to acquire companies which are most familiar with the standards, toolsets, and practices around this new breed of application infrastructure. 

Where Does HTML5 Fit into the Mobile User Experience?

Brad Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

• Emerging Web browser standards such as HTML5 promise mobile Web apps the features they and we so richly deserve.
• But have high powered browsers leveled the playing field between desktop and device as well as between native and mobile code? Not according to Facebook.

Software development is expensive, but it is especially costly in the realm of mobility. Developers must contend with the big three (iOS, Android and Windows 8/Mobile/RT) and maybe even BlackBerry, WebOS and others. For each target platform, they must often employ vastly different languages and authoring systems. 

The Open Network: Why Setting Developers Loose on Network-Hosted Resources Is Great

B. Washburn

Summary Bullets:

• App developers are business rainmakers; big carriers are consolidating and expanding network-side APIs to recruit them.
• Upcoming APIs such as network-layer control and call control (including collaboration) will raise the recruitment drive ante.

It’s finally happening: Carriers have long supported open networks, but they are now truly ‘opening’ these networks wide for customers to incorporate with their software.  This is not new to M2M players, or for customers that use carrier e-bonding.  Carriers give M2M developers access to software hooks that let them push data around via SMS, MMS, and even WAP; operators also can provide network-side location-based services.  E-bonding is at the other end of the scale, providing complex, automated connectivity to a carrier’s management interfaces.