In the earlier days of Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP) solutions, cost and time to market were two major barriers to entry, as price points of $1 million or more of up-front investment were required for the most basic deployments across perhaps a few hundred employees. Such a deployment could take at least six to eight months and would be hampered by technology changes in hardware and software.

In addition, what was deployed was often a solution that wasn’t scalable across the company and across multiple applications. Such time, price and scale concerns often deprioritised mobile application enablement in the enterprise. Some companies began to build on their own — an approach that often created some of the same scale and silo issues.

However, over the past year and a half, a number of factors have emerged to address these key challenges and additional catalysts have pushed forward tremendous growth in MEAP where organisations have begun to embrace MEAP and move away from building their own enterprise mobile applications.

What is Mobile Enterprise Application Platform?

A mobile enterprise application platform or MEAP is a comprehensive suite of products and services that enable development of mobile applications. The term was coined in a Gartner Magic Quadrant report in 2008 when they renamed their “multi-channel access gateway market”.

What is the purpose of Enterprise mobility platform?

Mobile enterprise application platforms address the difficulties of developing mobile software by managing the diversity of devices, networks and user groups at the time of deployment and throughout the mobile solution’s lifecycle. Unlike standalone apps, a MEAP provides a comprehensive, long-term approach to deploying mobility.

Cross-platform development considerations are one big driver behind using MEAPs. For example, a company can use a MEAP to develop the mobile application once and deploy it to a variety of mobile devices (including smart phones, tablets, notebooks and ruggedized handhelds) with no changes to the underlying business logic.

Platform applications are best for companies that wish to deploy multiple applications on a single infrastructure, scaled to the size of their current mobile field force and available in an online and offline mode. Mobile platforms provide higher-level languages and easy development templates to simplify and speed the mobile application development timeframe, requiring less programming knowledge for mobile business application deployment.

Organisational Challenges in Mobile Enterprise Application Platform

To keep up with market demand, many big organisations have given business units the freedom to create and launch dozens or even hundreds of apps. This has enabled business units, across industries, to quickly market innovative applications and benefit from the rapid return of investment. Although there’s a major upside to the MEAP, it has put forth a few challenges mentioned below:

MEAP Challenges

1. Maintaining the applications with bug fixes, support of new devices and OS updates along with ensuring that the content is up to date
2. Keeping the apps up to date when backend platform, external service APIs and other integration points change
3. Updating content from a myriad of content management systems, back office tools and admin interfaces
4. Measuring and comparing applications equally to apply insights and learning’s from one initiative and apply for others
5. Listening to user feedback on the app stores (or internally) and update the apps to keep users satisfied and engaged
6. Inconsistency of branding and look & feel aspects
7. Securing data (confidential and public), managing user authentication and trace-ability where logging is important

Achieving flexibility in working arrangements pose some enterprise problems that IT departments are now getting accustomed to: discovering & securing mobile devices (mobile device management or MDM), making sure they are provisioned with the appropriate applications (mobile application management or MAM) and ensuring the safety of sensitive content they access (mobile content management or MCM). Many of the solutions in these areas are now coalescing into enterprise mobility management (EMM) suites.

One of the biggest problems facing IT departments as they try to cater for mobile working concerns the kinds of applications they should develop and deploy. It’s a key problem because the enterprise software landscape is currently so varied, encompassing traditional off-the-shelf (mostly Windows) desktop applications, custom-written applications, native mobile apps (mostly iOS and Android), mobile web apps (increasingly HTML5) and cloud-based (SaaS) software.

For example, should CIOs and IT managers wait until native mobile, HTML5 or SaaS versions of their organisations’ key commercial desktop apps become available? And which mobile platforms should they support when mobilising their custom-written applications?

How to choose a MEAP Solution?

Once the requirements are clear there is a choice between choosing an existing platform and vendor, building one or possibly a hybrid of the two.

1. 1. Existing Platform

There are various vendors out there although most are also tied into a specific backend supplier. Existing solutions include SAP Mobile Platform, IBM Worklight, KonyOne and GG/DMI Open MEAP. Most of them are primarily paper products as each implementation is 80% custom development, but provide a good starting point.

1. 1. Creating a Custom Proprietary Platform

An alternative is to establish a standard framework based on a combination of best practice guidelines, tools and code that can be reused across the applications. Organisations such as MTV and ESPN have done this successfully over time.

1. Hybrid Model

The third option is to use an existing platform and customise it based on the organisation’s needs. This may be an especially great alternative if there are many common platforms and processes already. This can also be leveraged to create a standard for the applications as well.

Pros & Cons of Each Model

Model	Pros	Cons
Existing Platforms	Faster speed to market Potentially lower cost Ongoing support	License cost Lock-in to one supplier Flexibility
Creating a Custom Proprietary Platform	Tailored to the organisations needs Flexibility	Keeping up to speed with technology development Can be costly to develop and keep up to date
Hybrid Model	Combining the best of an existing platform and custom development	License costs Lock-in to one supplier

Available Platforms

Vendor	Description	Benefits
SAP Mobile Platform (previously Syclo)	Create and deploy mobile apps for the workforce and customers	Provides the greatest number of plugins and tools for SAP integration Cross-platform development based on Phonegap which is the most established dev tool
IBM Worklight	Mobile application platform to build, run and manage mobile applications	Plugins and tools for other IBM platforms Supports HTML5, Native and Hybrid apps
KonyOne Studio	One of the first MEAP solutions which claims to be standard based and reducing coding by up to 90%	Segment solutions and references for all major verticals Framework for cross-platform development
Antenna Software AMPChroma	Mobile cloud platform that manages the mobile lifecycle from Design, Build and Integrate to Publish, Run and Manage apps	Open platform allowing standardized tools Client technology enables “write once,” deploy on any device, any version
Kinvey	Backend as a Service solution, offering data integrations, legacy system mobilization, as well as complete app backends for developers creating apps	Backend as a Service reduces cost of backend development Plugins for Oracle, Salesforce
GG/DMI Open MEAP	Open development framework with reusable components, back-end plugins for most major platforms, content management, middleware and best practice guidelines	100% based on open source Using a combination of native development and web technology

IBM entered the mobile enterprise market “practically overnight” when it purchased MEAP player Worklight earlier this year. Worklight, a privately held Israel-based company, developed an open platform that speeds the delivery of mobile applications to multiple mobile devices. Financial terms were not disclosed but the deal was rumored to be around USD 50m-60m. Worklight raised roughly USD 20m in outside capital and was estimated to have 2011 revenue between USD 5m and USD 10m.

Less than two months ago, SAP-Sybase acquired California-based MEAP Syclo. Last month, Google acquired Motorola Mobility, which in turn had acquired Rhomobile, another independent California-based MEAP. Also in October, Adobe purchased a Canada-based MEAP Nitobi Software.

Next Step

Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms play an important role in providing the integration technology between corporate back-end systems and mobile devices including smartphones, tablets, notebooks and handhelds. As enterprises are under increasing pressure to deliver more applications across a wider set of platforms, MEAPs are poised to sweep in and steal market share by offering mobile application platforms more robust than those offered by traditional platforms vendors without a mobile strategy.

Rishabh Software helps organizations deploy enterprise mobile solutions. Our team of experts help in integrating & developing customised MEAP solutions along with our various other mobile app development services.

Our Enterprise Mobile services

• Enterprise Mobile Application Development
• Enterprise Mobile Migration & Integration
• Enterprise Mobile Application Testing
• Enterprise Mobile Application Support & Maintenance

Want to find out more about various mobile enterprise application platforms and how it can benefit your enterprise? Then do get in touch with us to get more information on our development services.