Why Enterprise Software Must Evolve In the Age of Apps
It’s hard to build mobile computing applications in the enterprise because there are not only so many data sources to integrate, the application itself needs to be able to work offline to minimize telecommunications costs.
Rising to address those twin issues, Alpha Software today released Alpha Anywhere 3.0, an upgrade to its mobile application development platform that is aimed primarily at addressing the needs of developers working inside enterprise IT organizations.
Alpha Software CTO Dan Bricklin says the latest release of Alpha Anywhere is designed to allow developers to build complex transaction processing applications running inside an HTML5-based browser to access backend services, regardless of the mobile computing device being employed.
Bricklin says most existing mobile development frameworks don’t make it easy for IT organizations to build applications that work offline. By addressing that issue, Bricklin says Alpha Software is dramatically reducing the total cost of deploying mobile applications. The core issue, says Bricklin, is that organizations need to limit their telecommunications costs by not requiring a mobile application to always be connected to a backend service in order to actually work.
Alpha Anywhere, says Bricklin, is designed to be simple enough to allow people with domain-level expertise to build a robust mobile application without having to master writing a lot of code. Instead, Bricklin says they can rapidly develop a prototype and then deploy it without necessarily requiring the intervention of a professional developer.
Mobile computing has clearly become a dominant enterprise IT issue. But what’s not perhaps appreciated is that many of those issues actually stem from the way the application is developed in the first place. For enterprise IT organizations that need an efficient way to support as many mobile applications as possible, the two issues that are front and center today are figuring out how to reduce not only the cost of developing an application, but also the cost of running it over the long haul.
