Mobile Development Trends for 2014
As one of the early pioneers of mobile computing, Good Technology has become a platform that IT organizations use to deliver data to mobile computing devices, and also to build applications on.
With the recent acquisition of BoxTone, a provider of a mobile device management service that is delivered via the cloud, Good Technology CTO Nicko van Someren says the company has become one of the few full-service providers of mobile computing services to the enterprise. To that end, Good Technology also recently unveiled Good Access, a secure container deployed within a mobile browser that runs on Apple iOS and Google Android devices, It also opened Good Pro, a secure mobile application store in the cloud, and formed an alliance with Samsung to deliver secure mobile devices based on the Samsung KNOX mobile computing hardware.
While security and management is obviously important when it comes to mobile computing, van Someren says it’s important to remember that those two capabilities are a means to an end. Business people want to be able to confidently and easily access data from any device, which van Someren says means a service has to focus on the mobile user interface experience and then work its way back to providing access to enterprise services.
In contrast, van Someren says that rivals are trying to cobble together a “bag of bits” that they expect enterprise IT organizations to deploy on their own.
At the moment, van Someren says there are over 1,300 mobile computing applications running on top of the Good Technology service. That number is increasing rapidly, because organizations have discovered that it’s much easier to dynamically evolve a mobile computing application over time than it is to build traditional enterprise IT applications. As such, van Someren notes that line of business leaders are much more inclined to invest in building data-driven mobile computing applications that enhance productivity without requiring a major investment in both time and money.
