Enterprise technology is exciting again. (ZDNet even calls it “sexy.” Who knew? Well, actually, we did.)
How did this happen? After a sleepy couple of decades, several factors aligned to create the perfect moment for an enterprise mobility revolution.
First of all, the incredible proliferation of mobile devices has created an enormous sea change. Nearly one-third of employees would rather lose their wallets than lose their personal mobile devices. Smartphone and tablet users have become accustomed to easy access to new apps, great design, and an “it just works” user experience. At the same time, they’ve also become more comfortable with iterative improvements—so long as those updates happen seamlessly, without a lot of fuss and effort.
Behind the scenes, the maturity of cloud hosting and the flourishing open-source movement have made advanced functionality easier than ever to develop, access and support. Capabilities imported from social media are opening up new levels of collaboration and synergy.
Add it all up, and conditions are ripe for real innovation in the enterprise space.
BUT the enterprise is facing a huge bottleneck in developing mobile apps. A recent survey of enterprises in the U.S. and the U.K. found that 85 percent had a development backlog of at least one app—and 50 percent had more than 10 apps stuck in the pipeline.
