So it’s fairly clear that different enterprises are at different levels in terms of their journey towards enterprise mobility. What started out as a uniform pitch from the MEAP vendors a couple of years back is becoming more tuned to suit the enterprise needs based on their maturity.
This has caused the MEAP vendors to rethink both offering and pricing strategies. The earlier notion of one size fits all – is slowly being done away with and more flexibility is being brought in.
For instance, enterprises which haven’t yet made a commitment to the space, would do well to just use MbaaS. Mobile backend as a service is an innovative spin given by some upcoming and leading MEAP vendors to accommodate risk appetites of enterprises. This helps to try of the concept of mobility, experiment enough before making a long term commitment.
MBaaS vendors export web interfaces for storage, user management, notifications etc. Services companies could tie-up with MBaaS vendors and develop skill-set on the MBaaS platforms. It will open avenues for winning customers who want to use MBaaS platforms.
On the other hand are enterprises, which have studied the space enough, and are not afraid to make purchase commitments to true enterprise class MEAP infrastructure which can serve a global scale.
However, integration with the Enterprise back-end servers is still a challenge in the adoption of the MEAPs. The services firms will continue to offer their integration services on the back-end integration. Mobile Enterprise Application Platform vendors provide Software development kits (SDKs) that aid developers. The SDKs typically provide application design tools, productivity tools and deployment tools.
Lastly are those enterprises which are in the middle – and will make MEAP infrastructure commitments. These purchases will not be from large scale players, rather will be from smaller niche startups / vendors.
MEAP vendors at large look towards adding value added components above their SDKs. For services companies, this is a potential collaboration area to explore and align their offerings to suit the above dynamics.
Forrester Wave, Enterprise Mobility Services 2013 predict that reusable assets and IP, ready-to-go-solutions will become a critical need for the market. In the context of the MEAP adoption, we believe that this is a relevant prediction to watch out for.
Authored by, SR Raja. Co-Authored with Vivek Madathil