Red Hat understands that developing a mobile application is not the same as building one for the desktop, which is why the company has augmented its software stack with new technologies for mobile development.
“The whole Web architecture is giving way to an emerging mobile architecture,” said Cathal McGloin, Red Hat vice president of mobile platforms.
Like IBM and Oracle, Red Hat has been working to extend its enterprise software portfolio so it can support mobile applications as well, particularly those that its customers develop in house.
“51% of organisations are increasing their budgets for mobile development this year, according to 451 Research”
The company said that it has completed integrating into its own software portfolio the mobile platform it acquired when it purchased Waterford-based FeedHenry last October. It has outlined how enterprises could use these technologies to build mobile applications.
Mobile investment
About 51% of organisations surveyed by IT analyst firm 451 Research are increasing their budgets for mobile development this year. Many face challenges, given that traditional software development methods don’t work well for the rapidly evolving world of mobile development.
Different mobile devices demand different user interfaces. Users are expecting mobile applications to be easier to use. Mobile apps must also evolve more quickly to stay abreast with the competition.
For enterprises, developing mobile applications for either customers or employees can be a demanding task, especially when the programs need to be seamlessly connected with complex back-end systems.
Red Hat wants to help bridge the worlds of mobile apps and back-end systems of record.
“The role of IT is to introduce new agile development technologies to complement the ability to run existing systems,” said McGloin, who is also the former CEO of FeedHenry.
Rapid evolution
The mobile market is evolving rapidly, with different acronyms for what a platform is, said Steve O’Keefe, Product Line Manager for Mobile and JBoss Middleware Products, Red Hat. “To me, this is all a sign of a market still sorting itself out.”
Speaking to TechPro, O’Keefe said the reason that it is still sorting itself out is that enterprises are still largely wrestling with the idea of mobile and how it extends enterprise applications.
Red Hat comes at this, he said, from the perspective of providing the technology, tools and techniques to enterprise for building custom applications and running them.
“What we have found our customers wrestling with is, how do I embrace mobile and be mobile first? But how do I get mobile right? What’s the right architecture? What is the right developer experience? How do I integrate these fascinating and rapidly changing technologies with my longstanding, stable and reliable core IT systems?”
“As we asked these questions and asked what enterprise mobile is about, how enterprise will use mobile to extend the applications they use today and integrate mobile into their workflows and processes,” O’Keefe said, “that’s what brought us to FeedHenry.
Enterprise Focus
Very early on, they had adopted an enterprise focus, said O’Keefe, whereas many of the other mobile companies out there were focused on the mobile developer or the consumer, or the “guy in his garage who wanted to build the next Angry Birds”.
“That’s not who our customers are focused on,” he stated.
FeedHenry’s approach to the enterprise marketplace was unique, argued O’Keefe, and they had made some insightful and forward looking decisions on their platform architecture and how they looked at their use cases.
“Most of the technology out there is really focused on the application developer, not on the app integration. Fundamentally, there are two different cultures colliding in our enterprise. We’ve got the fast rapidly changing, iterative development of the mobile app where there might be releases every week, and core IT systems need to be stable, reliable and evolve slowly over time.”
The FeedHenry platform, on an architectural level, embraced cloud, Node.JS and mobile as this new architecture, said O’Keefe. Building on that direction to facilitate the type of mobile development that enterprise wants, but getting that time deployment and time value that you can have in a mobile app that doesn’t disturb mainline enterprise systems.
Reduced workload
The FeedHenry mobile platform is designed to reduce the work needed to maintain mobile applications, including tasks around data synchronisation, caching and security.
For mobile-based cloud services, the company has established a single architecture based on a set of Representational State Transfer (REST) application programming interfaces (API), allowing different applications to communicate with one another.
Red Hat’s integrated development environment (IDE), JBoss Developer Studio, can be used to create apps that run on FeedHenry.
The FeedHenry platform has been augmented with additional tools for mobile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and collaboration, allowing software development teams to rapidly iterate through new releases of a mobile app.
Red Hat has also teamed the FeedHenry software with its own set of platform services, OpenShift, allowing organisations to run their mobile apps within a cloud service.
This integration also allows enterprise customers to run mobile apps from their own private clouds.
A portion of Red Hat’s customers are already using the mobile technology to build mobile applications, McGloin said, including companies in the industries of manufacturing, transportation and workforce management.
IDG News Service and TechCentral Reporters
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