1. Enterprise Mobile Development is About
Backend not About Frontend
Mobile development in the enterprise is far from being an easy endeavor. The time and
resources that takes building mobile applications causes most organizations to allocate
large budgets and development cycles to enterprise mobile development efforts. When
you analyze where most of that time and effort is spent, the answer is astonishing:
backend infrastructure.
You read that right.
Enabling identity management, storage, integration with enterprise systems, messaging,
etc represent the biggest challenge for developers writing enterprise mobile apps.
While the backend infrastructure for enterprise mobile apps is undoubtedly important, its
not the type of problem you want your mobile developers to spend the bulk of their time
on. More importantly, the skillsets required for mobile development are fundamentally
different than for implementing backend infrastructure so typically that responsibility
requires different groups of engineers. Consequently, mobile development initiatives end
up doubling or tripling the anticipated time and budget building unanticipated
infrastructure components.
From an enterprise standpoint, enabling rich and robust capabilities to mobile
applications is the key element in order to achieve true agility during the implementation
of enterprise mobile solutions. Because of it’s relevance, mobile backend should become
one of the primary focus of organizations in order to enable a successful enterprise
mobile infrastructure. The following list explains this reasoning.
We’ve Solved the Frontend Problem
These days, developers have a large number of options for implementing frontend
mobile experiences. Whether you are building native, hybrid or mobile-web experiences,
there are a large number of designer and development stacks appealing to various
developer skillsets. Complimentary the mobile development and designer technologies
communities have grown tremendously offering developers a lot of resources in order to
master those technologies.
While mobile development still remains a novelty in the enterprise, the entry points for
building mobile frontend experiences are considerably lower than a few years ago.

2. Integration Integration Integration
Without a doubt, the integration with line of business systems represents the number
one challenges of enterprise mobile solutions. Whether on-premise or SaaS-based,
simplifying the experience of integrating with enterprise systems will allow developers to
focus on delivering great mobile experiences while drastically reducing the development,
testing and operational efforts of your enterprise mobile solutions.
Mobile Developers don’t Speak Backend Infrastructure
This skillsets required to build mobile applications are fundamentally different and
sometimes even contradictory to the expertise needed to build backend infrastructures.
In that sense, it’s is to expect that mobile developers will require additional human and
technical resources in order to implement the correct backend infrastructure for their
enterprise mobile apps.
Providing a simpler mechanism to incorporate backend capabilities into enterprise mobile
solutions, will allow mobile developers to focus on what they do best: building great
frontend experiences and robust business logic using their favorite mobile development
platform.
Consistent Development Experience
Like any other influential enterprise software trend, mobility is a long term game for
most organizations. In that sense, enterprises typically attempt to establish the
development and operational processes that will allow them to implement several mobile
apps as part of different enterprise initiatives. Enabling a consistent experience for
enabling backend capabilities to enterprise mobile apps, will help organizations to
establish the correct best practices and techniques across their different mobile
development efforts.
Simpler Management
Similar to the previous point, providing a consistent backend infrastructure for
enterprise mobile apps will drastically simplify the complexity of managing those apps
across their lifecycle. Not standardizing on a mobile backend will most likely translate
onto an operational nightmares for the IT professionals tasked to manage the different
mobile applications