How Intrepid Companies Are Getting Their Business Apps Onto Smartphones

Complexity Vs. Performance
A wild card in this market is mobile middleware players, including Antenna, Sybase, and startups such as Dexterra and Spring Wireless. Antenna, a 10-year-old privately held company, offers development frameworks for the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile devices. Using Antenna's kit, developers can build an application once and render it through many mobile frameworks. Its middleware synchronizes and routes data between mobile apps and back-end systems and can be installed on-site or used as a hosted service. It sells connectors for linking ERP, CRM, and supply chain management, among other applications, to its middleware, which delivers the apps to mobile devices.

The question with mobile middleware is whether the complexity of a third-party vendor is worth the performance. Baylor College of Medicine decided it's not. Instead, the college is one of the first users of SAP's NetWeaver Mobile 7.1 middleware, released in December, which it's using to handle data transfers between its SAP R/3 system and ruggedized Windows handheld devices, used for reading bar codes on scientific equipment for asset-tracking purposes. Baylor IT manager Paul Sammons says some of the third-party mobile middleware worked beautifully during testing. "But then we'd have to deal with third-party maintenance and licensing and updates and patches," he says. "We have the SAP-trained staff here to help us deal with anything that comes up."

SAP soon will let companies connect to NetWeaver middleware mobile apps that aren't built for the NetWeaver Mobile client, a recent SAP blog post said. That would make it easier for companies to offer more mobile device choices.

Beyond the architecture questions, IT teams also are starting to push enterprise software vendors for a better user experience on mobile devices.

Nygard, a women's clothing maker and retailer, got results by pressuring its business intelligence vendor, MicroStrategy, to beef up its mobile capability. MicroStrategy helped Nygard build a program to query its data warehouse from a smartphone, letting merchandising specialists visiting stores access the stores' sales information, inventory, and order levels. MicroStrategy customized its Excel interface for the BI data to make it easier to navigate on the BlackBerry screen.

SaaS On Mobile
One of the biggest questions for mobile integration is how big a role software as a service will play. Spotty mobile Internet connectivity's the big drawback now, but SaaS vendors are getting around that by building apps that can be used offline. Oracle's and Salesforce.com's mobile CRM apps both have offline options.

Workday this month made its first iPhone application available on the Apple App Store, free to customers of its HR SaaS offering. Managers can approve expenses, new hires, and compensation changes from their iPhones. Since it hosts the software, Workday handles the data synchronization and device-to-server integration issues to deliver data to the phone. Workday says it will make more apps available on the App Store and later this year extend it to BlackBerry users. CTO Stan Swete says Workday started with the iPhone, though BlackBerry has more business users, because it could build the app faster. Swete says the RIM development kit "was less well developed" than the iPhone kit.

Drive Financial, a car-loan company for borrowers with credit problems, subscribes to Salesforce for managing its customer data, uses the Salesforce To Go mobile application for BlackBerrys, and uses a software service from Salesforce partner Ribbit to translate voice mails to BlackBerry text messages. Drive Financial's 100 salespeople spend their days visiting car dealerships, building relationships they hope will lead dealers to steer new car buyers their way. Mobile access eliminated the need for salespeople to lug stacks of paper they used to print out each morning before starting their calls. "It's a great productivity enhancement for our salespeople but also a chance to get our feet wet with cloud computing," says Drive Financial CIO Don Goin.

However, the company's salespeople must use company-issued BlackBerrys, even though Salesforce To Go works better on the iPhone, Goin says. Drive Financial deals with sensitive customer data, and Goin isn't convinced Apple offers enough in terms of IT management and security. "If someone loses a BlackBerry, we can wipe it clean from a central console," he says.

The trade-offs and tough choices business technology managers must make about mobile devices aren't going away. Setting a strategy and then understanding the mobile software ecosystem that can deliver it are the first steps to a enterprise-wide mobile strategy.

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