By Heena Jhingan
Whether CIOs like it or not, trends like enterprise mobility and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) have inadvertently crept in the enterprises and definitely are not leaving the organizations’ premises as of now. Along with the employee owned devices, apps downloaded from public app stores disrupt today’s IT security as well as the application and procurement strategies.
Bring your own application (BYOA) has become as important as bring your own device (BYOD) in the development of a comprehensive mobile strategy and the trend toward BYOA has begun to affect desktop and web applications too. Amidst this growing trend, for IT heads, the Enterprise App Stores (EAS) offers some respite against unclear or lack of any explicit mobility policy in organizations.
Given such trend, the applications adoption in the enterprises is set to grow at a rapid pace. According to an IDC report, the Enterprise Mobility market in India is expected to grow to $1.1 billion by 2017. About 15% of that would constitute Mobile Device Management, Mobile Application Management, Mobile Security and Mobile Business Applications.
Gartner analysts expect that as more companies adopt mobile device management (MDM), and more devices come online—which will inevitably draw more people to the Apple App Store, Google Play and other app stores—more enterprises will set up their own app stores. According to Gartner estimates, almost 25% of enterprises will have a store for managing corporate-sanctioned apps on PCs and mobile devices by 2017.
While analysts and research firms expect the enterprise mobility to grow, most CIOs in India have a different take that indicates of an unclear picture of enterprise app store and they are trying to learn to deal with this new trend of BYOD and how to manage those range of devices and applications accessed by employees in respective organizations.
“Corporate app stores come from many vendor areas, including mobile application development platform (MADP), mobile device management (MDM) and mobile application management (MAM) specialists. Apart from companies setting up their own app stores enterprise software companies like SAP also have offerings in this space. The CIOs are still weighing whether to build their own applications or depend on existing platforms of vendors,” Sood explains, adding that future technologies make a conducive environment for proliferation of enterprise app stores.
“However, the CIOs will need to first take an over all look and come up with a mobility strategy to deal with the trend. Once the self service kind of capabilities are set up on the private cloud platform, the market will see a stronger case for these stores and a larger number of them will be available in the market,” Davis adds.
On the India front, Sood says, “In India, we continue to see demand for apps that extend typical business applications like sales force automation, customer relationship management, work flows and approvals, and mobile business intelligence, largely from the white goods and financial sector companies but device costs and security challenges keep them away from multi-app deployment scenarios. It’s still early days for enterprises to implement their own app stores in India.”
Apps galore
A key trigger for the growth of enterprise app stores as a concept is the fact that though enterprises have numerous choices for downloading software onto PCs, but most of them don’t offer support for smartphones and tablets. And this is where enterprises need to formalize more standard support for these devices and need a way to manage mobile application provisioning in time to come, especially when they are looking to develop their own in-house apps across those devices.
To date, enterprises have modestly supported mobile apps for very few reasons. Firstly, mobile apps limits the enterprise data that is available on the devices (mostly to messaging and personal information manager [PIM] data) and there wasn’t any such need to support those apps. However, that is now changing and enterprises are willing to access even mission critical apps on the move.
Secondly, most apps on business devices are third-party apps downloaded from an app store such as Apple App Store and Google Play. Now with the rise in app counts being developed in-house by enterprises for their users, there are enterprise software vendors like SAP and Oracle, which are providing additional support for mobile enterprise applications. This in a way is helping create an ecosystem of enterprise apps and support system via software vendors.
Despite an inundation of enterprise-class applications on public or vendor app stores, Sunil Bhave, Vice President, Fujitsu Consulting India, feels that there are compatibility issues as most tools are either mobility oriented or desktop-oriented, which is where a link to address both segments seems to be missing.
“In addition, due to possible issues around usage of multiple mobile operating systems, product companies are now building and enhancing tools (enterprise app hubs) to address this gap. In the interim, it is addressed through internal customizations and workarounds,” Bhave says.
Build or buy
There are clearly two paths for enterprises considering to embark on the enterprise mobility journey. An enterprise can either can support its own app store or have its MDM vendor to host one. SAP, Intel and Nvidia are some global firms that have set up corporate app shops.
For instance, Intel started out by designing their app store by developing apps for simple tasks such as booking a conference room, so that if things didn’t go well with it they would not have any serious consequences.
Today, Intel has over 80 applications across devices. Its mobility policy is liberal to such an extent that despite offering a sanctioned store, it doesn’t stop employees from downloading apps from public stores, if they choose to in the name of productivity.
According to Srinivas Tagigadapa, Director – Enterprise Solution Sales, Intel South Asia, nearly 50% of their employees access employee supported applications on their own devices.
For software vendor SAP, an app store is nothing new. The German firm had started to work on app store about a decade ago and today SAP’s software corner (app store) supports over 50,000 employees. More over, SAP’s app platform not only has company apps but it offers third party developed apps too.
Similarly, the German developer of Computer-Aided-Design (CAD) software Graebert is all set to launch the Android version of its solution early next year and plans to have an app store.
“We would also like to introduce an app store and where we can offer third party developers a sales channel by its own. So, if somebody uses ARES (our CAD package) he can check on the app store if there’s an application available that specializes in mechanical, electrical or any other architectural functionality. And We believe that access to these kind of developers through our CAD software can revolutionize the market on the lower end,” says Wilfred Graebert, CEO, Graebert.
Such a model works really well once the premise for an app exists and the developers are motivated to make applications to compete against publicly available app store that benefit users as well as they can monetize it.
Over the past few years, there has been a rise in number of EAS vendors and each are trying to offer various features, addressing different needs of companies. Cisco, McAfee and Apperian are some of the player in EAS space.
While Cisco offers both external and internally licensed apps to end-users, security firm McAfee has included basic EAS features to its general framework. On the other side, India’s IT major Infosys has Flypp Enterprise platform that helps organizations create in-house and customize business applications as per their needs.
Interestingly, the US based Apperian has an EAS module in its mobile development profile and is credited for building the first Mobile Application Management cloud platform.
Nilesh Goradia,Head of Pre-Sales, India Subcontinent, Citrix believes that a corporate app store ideally should allow access to applications of enterprise irrespective of the fact whether the apps reside in the enterprise’s data center or are hosted on the cloud.
“There are instances where the enterprise might like to use mail hosted on their data center and use SaaS-based CRM. Having the right MDM ecosystem is critical in such cases,” Goradia points.
He says, “This is what we are doing to our Unified Storefront that enables the mobile enterprise in helping to build enterprise app and data store for self-service access to SaaS, web, mobile, and Windows apps.”
“It is equally importantl that an app store puts the IT department back in charge of brokering access to applications that the company has paid for and that employees are using,” stresses BS Nagarajan, Director – Systems Engineering for India & SAARC, VMware.
Employers proactively offering an app that can negotiate a better price for a bundle of licenses – a benefit that increases with the size of the company. In fact, VMware’s Horizon product line is based on this concept, wherein, the virtual desktops and apps will need a central broker and an app store is the easiest metaphor for how to deliver it.
“Horizon Workspace is nothing but an enterprise app store that helps enterprises manage their productivity applications,” Nagarajan explains.
The need to be a flexible platform and able to work across platforms has pushed MDM vendor Blackberry to create support app management that goes beyond the BlackBerry (BB) platform.
“BlackBerry Enterprise Service BES 10 enables cross platform management of BlackBerry 7, BlackBerry 10, PlayBook, Android and iOS devices and tablets — all from a unified management console. And in India, we have over got over 500 customers for this solution in a short time span.
“With BES 10 we can containerize personal and enterprise applications even on non-BlackBerry devices,” claims Sunil Lalvani, Managing Director for India, BlackBerry.
Design with care
Given the wide products range offering some level of app store capability, it’s important to clarify the goals and the business case for the app store before buying or building one as the permutations of features vary with the goals.
Going ahead, there are several impediments that the CIOs will have to confront as mobile portfolio expands into a form of new infrastructure unlike the regular IT systems in the enterprises.
According to a Wipro published white paper, the users of an enterprise app store could be remote, the devices change practically everyday, hardware is inaccessible and advancements in mobile technology are sudden and abrupt. So, keeping track with these changes will be a crucial for CIOs.
“In India, an enterprise user on an average carries 3 devices, in such a state the risk of not considering an EAS is even greater as a part of the mobility strategy as IT will stay in the state of chaos, the mobile devices will keep increasing and the employees will be dissatisfied,” comments Sood of Gartner.
On the design front for any corporate app store, the CIOs will require to follow the KYE (Know Your Employee) norm. “Use internal data to gather basic relationship and transactional information, collection of data from external sources like social media and use predictive analysis to gauge the popularity of the apps will play an instrumental role in putting together a rich corporate store,” Sood adds.
Lastly, the enterprises will have to compete with those public app stores keeping in mind the main focus area is to make access of apps simple with high user experience. At times, the users might expect the productivity apps to mimic social behavior.
The trend ahead
The idea of EAS largely evolved to help secure distribution of apps and protect access to corporate data at different level of management within the enterprise. However with the unprecedented growth of mobile devices and vendor driven application stores, the need for managing those range of devices and applications become even more vital.
From the enterprise perspective, the need for both MDM and EAS is equally important, there’s a high possibility that MDM and EAS could form a single entity.
The EAS and MDM market is consolidating, some of the smaller providers have already been or are about to get acquired. It’s mainly because the Mobile Application Management functionality that app stores provide is appearing in a wide range of other products.
Further, this raises question mark on the fate of stand-alone app stores and management tools against the growing MDM market. Gartner believes that MAM (Mobile Application Management) is a subset of MDM. “We also expect that dedicated, stand-alone corporate app store tools will vanish by 2014, subsumed by app store functions implemented in a range of other tools, especially MDM products,” Sood says.
With the same view, J J McChesney, Head of Product, Enterprise Mobility Division, Symphony Teleca, says, “All MDM vendors will end up providing core EAS functionality. Indeed, we believe the distinction between EAS and MDM provider will eventually disappear.”
“In coming years, EAS and MDM platforms will complete merge. Further, they will morph into another class of platform that will likely include M2M management, so that companies can have a holistic solution for managing the ‘internet of things’ that are delivering services to their employees,” McChesney concludes.