Understanding Mobile Platform Imperatives

This week I will try and discuss high level technical and business consideration for an enterprise mobile platform. please feel free to comment.

Why is Mobile Impportant:

• Over last year alone 3000% of WW mobile traffic ballooned. – Includes Voice and data
• This space is expected to grow 40X over next 5 years
• 11% of the world owns a tablet ( now we have 89% of 6+ billion and growing)
• 90% of the world has access to the mobile networks ( well this amazed me as 90% of world does not have access to clean water and food, but has access to mobile network)
• 2/3 of us get most of our news on mobile devices
• 76% take pictures and video on mobile devices
• in past 2 years mobile ready sites have grown from 150,000 to 3 million
• 11 billion apps in 2010
• On commerce front – this year $6.2 billion purchase were made from Mobil device --- compare that to $54.2 billion black Friday sales
• If mobile users would be nation, it would be largest nation….. And I could go on…

What are the Business drivers and technical considerations:

• New business models and paradigms
• Social network! Obviously?

– Everyone wants to be on Facebook/linkedin etc

– Every solution is compared to scalability and availability like social networks

– Capitalize on ‘perceived’ new markets on social network.

• Emerging Channels of commerce

– New breed of personal devices

– Speed of commerce

– Low tolerance for ‘slow’ experience

– New lines of currency – Zynga, SMS for money transfer?

• Proliferation of ‘smart’ phones (AND Data!)

– Do everything but make phone calls (?)

– Exponential growth of these phones ( 35% of US population as an example)

– 128 million iPhones (about that many other phones)

– Emerging markets ( India, China, Brazil, Russia etc)

• Globalization!!

– Single market for everything

– Everything is linked

• Brand/Image Exposure – How U interact with my business.

Solution : Cloud Computing? MEAP? MCAP? Next Buzz Big thing?

Mobile Design Points and middleware landscape

Enterprise Design Points:

• Deliberate and Intentional engagement
• Exposing back end services and data
• Data transfer and data growth considerations
• Bandwidth and TCP Socket chatter
• MEAP or MCAP?
• Enterprise Integration
• Security – enterprise and endpoint security
• Device and Platform support
• Legal responsibilities – Application store, client data and resulting exposure

Technical Design Points:

• 1.Enterprise application integration (tools and libraries
• 2.Device integration and peripheral support
• 3. Application client runtime
• 4. Device/OS platform support
• 5. Packaged mobile
• 6. Hosting
• 7. Architectural flexibility

(Source: Gartner Research Note G00211688)

What are these landscape changes driving?

Elasticity

• Rapid provisioning
• Configuration Automation
• Virtualization – HW (e.g. VMware/PowerVM) and Middleware (e.g. WVE)

Scalability

• eXtreme Caching – improving speed and scalability
• Data/cache partitioning and co-location

Data awareness and real time processing

• Sense and response or even driven architectures (Fraud/Marketing/BI)
• Reduced processing – or off loading to a efficient tier
• Moving data closest to application (relevant logic)

Core message of how Mobile will impact middleware:

Achieve Elasticity and Scalability – Application Infrastructure (WebSphere /Other enabled middleware)

Data awareness and real time processing – require new architectures and design.

Have a great Week!

:)

Nitin