Next-Generation Mobile Platforms Solve Business Problems

By Stephen D. Drake, Sybase iAnywhere

Next-generation mobile platforms will leverage much of what we saw in terms of adoption in the enterprise — Web 2.0 technologies, the use of Web services and service-oriented architectures, composite applications, and context-aware applications. Mobile platform providers are beginning to move their solutions to reflect current enterprise customers' architecture requirements.

The ability to adopt these technologies and open standards via a mobile platform provides organizations a chance to use Java or .NET for Web services — based deployments where organizations could rapidly deploy applications in a matter of days and weeks rather than months. With such technologies, a mobile enterprise platform also provides a much more manageable path to deploying applications to multiple devices with different operating systems. Such platforms would enable companies to deploy applications specific to employees' business processes and daily task requirements. With such extensible environments, enterprises can deliver mashups incorporating their own back-end systems with third-party content to distribute more dynamic applications to a broader set of mobile workers. These context-aware applications bring added value to current static mobile enterprise applications.

Such platforms are beginning to take shape from innovative mobile enterprise software providers and are being deployed to customers that are often seeking to embrace a single platform for a number of applications to a growing population of mobile workers.