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Craig Mathias

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Developers Still Hold the Key to Enterprise Mobile Success

There's not always an app for that

By Craig Mathias on Mon, 08/17/09 - 4:56pm.

The announcement today by Mobile Unified Communications (MUC) leader DiVitas Networks and Samsung Electronics, who themselves play a pretty leading role in handsets, that the Samsung Mobile Innovator's Software Developer Kit (SDK) version 1.2.0 will have hooks for DiVitas' products reinforces the importance of application developers in successful mobile enterprise deployments. Many, I'm sure, have thought that clients for just about every handset and for just about every back-end enterprise service important to mobility would have been developed by now. After all, if you have an iPhone, there's an app for that. But the enterprise world is different, and will remain such, mandating custom solutions for some time to come. In the consumer world, it may very well be that he with the most apps wins. In the enterprise world, however, that might just be he with the best developer support.

The reason, of course, is that enterprise apps must almost always be tailored to the needs of a particular firm. I still believe the Web services model will eventually dominate here, but, just to take the example of mobile unified/converged communications, there's a need to tweak a lot of settings on the handset itself, and it may also be desirable to conform to or enforce certain security settings and policies - again, just for example. A standard app would have to be pretty complex to handle all of the possible variations, so writing a little procedural code, while not inexpensive, is often the most cost-effective route.

But note also that the parties involved in provisioning developer tools can derive significant market advantage as well. Sure, DiVitas gets support on another line of handsets, and Samsung has another weapon in the fiercely-competitive corporate handset space. But Microsoft is also involved here, getting a shot in the arm for Window Mobile. You think writing code is interesting? It is - I got my start doing just that. But figuring out what all of the various subtleties in announcements like this mean is a lot more difficult, and a lot more fun - hence my current choice of career.

Bottom line, though - this is likely to be a very significant announcement for all concerned. The iPhone and the BlackBerry aren't the only corporate choices. Mobile converged/unified communications will be a key driver of handset sales and corporate mobility strategies alike for a nice long stretch into the future. And announcements like this one show just how important mastery of all of the elements of the mobility food chain really is.