According to Citrix, mobile cloud has been a steady feature of many of its client interactions over the last year but there has been a marked increase this year.
“I’d go as far as to say we’re looking at an explosion of projects and that looks like already lasting into next year, with these projects using an end-to-end approach than just looking for a specific use. Mobile cloud is much more powerful now and those tactical projects are becoming more strategic,” said O’Rourke Veitch.
Salesforce really opened the floodgates and proved what could be achieved with SaaS and that’s evolved naturally to include a mobile aspect. As a trend it’s here to stay — you can tell that because there are some big companies putting a lot of resources into their cloud environments, Lorcan Cunningham, Savenet Solutions
“The conversations that we’re having are no longer about companies seeking to give staff access to one application, they’re more geared towards companies who want to know how they can roll out desktops and applications irrespective of device.”
“We’re also having more conversations about BYOD whereas that didn’t really feature last year much at all.”
Cloud differentiation
According to Mark Van Der Linden, enterprise country manager for Google in Ireland and the UK, there is a key difference between apps that are fully delivered over the cloud and those that have cloud-enabled components.
“In order to reap the benefits of cloud computing delivered to mobile users, first you need a fast and reliable mobile-first cloud platform. That could be a Google platform or it could be an Amazon platform or whatever, but either way that will enable the cloud for mobile users,” he said.
“That can mean dedicated apps, like our Google Apps, delivered to Android or IOS or any other modern mobile device through a browser. But what we are increasingly seeing is the development of bespoke business mobile-first applications.”
Van Der Linden cites the Google customer Rentokil as an example of how this is being done. The pest control specialist uses a bespoke cloud-enabled mobile app to streamline how staff carry out site visits.
“First they migrated their e-mail to the Google platform then they started to use the other features of Google Apps like collaboration on docs, hangouts and social. They saw the advantages of that and decided to go further and develop enterprise grade mobile applications to support their day to day work and their business processes,” he said.
Before embracing a mobile methodology, the way in which Rentokil carried out building surveys involved sending a pest control engineer to the customer’s site to do the survey. This person would then take photographs of their findings and write up a paper-based report before mailing it to the customer.
“By the time they got it weeks might have gone by. Now they have a smart phone and tablet application that handles all that more or less in real time. The customer can have the report before the engineer has even left the site.”
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