Topic:
How does rise in Mobile Cloud services
aid in delivering Digital experience?
Folks! This week I’d like to focus on
increasingly vital role of cloud in delivering mobile content, engagements and
Mobile services. With all of my client engagements I find that a solution design around Mobile Solutions
includes:
a.
Eco
system integration – Includes things like Mobile OS, APIs
and notification eco systems, etc.
b.
Cloud
integration – MbaaS, Cloud Services, APIs, and invocation
of other Mobile services.
c.
Enterprise
Integration – Includes integration with existing middleware
and legacy systems.
In my previous posts I
discussed “Digital Strategy” as a
conversation starter. Where I
questions ours and our clients’ understanding of a “Digital Strategy”. Do our clients’ understand what it is?
Do we understand what is a
“Digital Strategy”?
Investment into IT strategy be it in Cloud, Big Data, Business analytics
and even enterprise mobile platforms can be construed as Digital Strategy, but
it is far from what it ought to
be. Designing a solution for an integrated digital platform implies designing
for a new agile application infrastructure that is ready for new workloads.
Such a design assumes thinking around a new era of business, client interaction
and simple transaction, be it selling, commerce, client care will be pervasive,
much like how we interaction with our connection in social media (on-line or in
person), it is context aware, relevant and pervasive!
I have been discussing the focus on Digital
Strategy since December 2013, and I think that our industry is at an inflection
point, that any meaningful transformative solution design will include Mobile
and Cloud. I also think that value proposition of the Cloud computing itself it
transforming. Cloud, in it’s infancy offered value with server consolidation
and extended capacity, and as cloud matures, so does it’s value proposition. Cloud
models today tout not only application development and delivery, but also a
platform to develop composable services to rapidly deliver application. This
model enables business to quickly to test new market or respond to dynamic
market place and deliver accelerated business value.
Now that we have
discussed the value and emergence of Mobile-Cloud services that aid in
application delivery, I would like to revisit some common terms and define a
taxonomy for our discussion.
The terms described below have evolved to provide a
structure and concept consumption around Cloud paradigms:
IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service
(Essentially HW + OS + Other Network services)
PaaS – Platform as a Service
(IaaS + Platform technologies such as Middleware/Directory services etc)
SaaS – Software as a Service
(Bring your Mouse and yes.. your brains.… and provision and configure/consume
services)
Let
us see how the Market place is shaping up:
There are at least 20 ( Mostly start-up)
companies (and growing) that now focus on BaaS in one form or another, some
notable examples include -
Stackmob,
Parse, Kinvey, Apple's iCloud, RhoMobile, Appcelerator (Cocoafish), FeedHenry
Astrum Space, Scotty App, Webmynd, YorAPI, CloudyRec, Applicasa, QuickBlox,
mobDB, Netmera, Kumulos, CodeCloud.io, Sencha.io,Tiggzi and Zipline Games
Large companies that could move into this space
very easily, including IBM, Amazon with its AWS products, Microsoft with its
Azure Cloud, Google with App Engine, and Rackspace.
Now most of these cloud services provide some, if
not all of the features below such as :
- User profiles with social login support for Facebook and Twitter
- Custom data objects and storage
- Analytics and metrics
- Push notification support
- Rich location data
- APIs for Mobile Applications
- Location based services integrations
- Other services such as DBaaS, IDaaS etc.
Mobile
Trends driving Cloud Adoption
Mobile computing driven trends may tip
the scale in driving the cloud patterns to new heights. In my client
discussions, below are a few trends that are driving the cloud based services
delivery and consumption for Mobile Application.
-Software and Data Ownership
-Burden of System Management
-Continually evolving Mobile
Eco-system
-Ephemeral nature of Mobile
Application landscape
-Changing mindset around investment
and consumerization of Mobile platforms
-Social ’ization’ of Mobile APIs
and more…
The idea is a fundamental understanding
of how we position our mobile Solution that is :
a.
Meaningful,
b.
Relevant AND
c.
Cost effective.
I would like to stress these three simple
characteristic from a Mobile Solution design perspective, because the symbiotic
relationship between mobile and cloud goes above and beyond data storage and
environment provisioning. Mobile device, which are limited by on device compute
capability ( memory, CPU, power etc), can leverage Cloud to extend compute
capacity. Mobile Cloud allows for access and synchronization of data, improves
scalability by optimizing content, and collaboration, - all securely and with an enterprise context – Delivering a superior Digital experience.
Last week at MWC – Mobile World Congress and IBM Pulse – 2
leading industry conference – Mobile(MWC) and Cloud (Pulse), IBM made a few
significant announcements. These announcements are indicative of IBMs
leadership and commitment to the “Third Platform” – which is a converged Mobile
and Cloud platform.
IBM Specific Announcements:
From
an IBM SWG perspective, IBM
announced enhancements to
a.
Blueworks Live, BPM on Cloud, and Cast Iron Live;
b.
Betas of PureApplication Service on SoftLayer and Patterns
on SoftLayer;
c.
New offerings such as Mobile Push and Engage and IBM MobileFirst
Cloud Services/MBaaS;
d.
Betas of Mobile Services, Internet of Things
e.
and more!
So I would like to spend some time discussing
there announcements, and discuss how Mobile applications and solutions can
exploit these new ( and improved) enterprise enablement capabilities:
IBM BlueMix – As I read and play with
this, I think BlueMix attempts to provide a Hybrid PaaS and Saas model, where
some middleware platforms and capabilities are available and some are exposed
as APIs, that can be composed to form mobile services, integration services, data services, dev
ops services, a full set of services that enable me now to build my next
generation of application.
IBM BlueMix is designed to be an open cloud platform
built on Pivotal's Cloud Foundry. IBM also made its software suite available on
BlueMix – BlueMix Catalog and BlueMix Offers ( MbaaS beta) is a good example to
explore. So in short BlueMix provides following ramp up features:
a. Run
apps in any language
b. Build
on open standards (OpenStack – Cloud Foundry)
c. Provides
integration services to system of record
d. Designed
for Mobile
e. Rapidly
delivering composable services
f. Provides
DevOps services for integrated dev experience
IBM Softlayer – Another cool acquisition, which is a
IaaS provider and competes directly with Amazon and Azure ( Microsoft), etc. Many
of IBMs own SaaS delivery models are finding their way to be hosted on
Softlayer. So just because our own SaaS ( new and emerging) offerings that are
hosted on SoftLayer, it is fair to label Softlayer as Hybrid IaaS-SaaS ? I tend
not to classify them as a Hybrid
IaaS-SaaS, because SaaS offerings are mere consumers of the IaaS models offered
by Softlayer.
Cloudant – Cloudant adds a rich set of DBaaS
capability to IBMs Cloud portfolio with
Mobile application design as it’s focus. Cloudant's DBaaS allows mobile
and Web developers to access mobile data with NoSQL technology.
In conclusion - Let us take time to
understand the trends, drivers and technology that support agile mobile
application models. Mobile and Cloud as technology platform will continue to evolve on their own,
but the new generation mobile application will drive the synergies to form a
converged “Third Platform” with one goal - Delivering a superior, personalized and contextual Digital
experience.
Reference:
6.
Rackspace Cloud Mobile Stack
-http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/mobile-stacks/
7.
IBM Bluemix - http://www-01.ibm.com/software/ebusiness/jstart/bluemix/index.html
8.
Forrester MBaaS - http://blogs.forrester.com/michael_facemire/12-04-25-mobile_backend_as_a_service_the_new_lightweight_middleware
9.
Third Platform- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_platform
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