Enterprise Mobile informatization Application development Model Selection Guide

With the gradual deepening of mobile internet, mobile applications have moved from popular applications such as news, search, e-commerce, games and video to enterprise mobile applications. And the size of the market is increasing year by years, according to IDC report, the 2013 China Enterprise Mobile application Market size of $930 million, is expected to reach $4.15 billion in 2017, 2013-2017-year compound growth rate of 45.3%.

▲ Enterprise Mobile informatization Application development Model Selection Guide

Enterprise Mobile Informatization has undergone several important stages, from watching to groping, to landing implementation. IT168 Research Center for companies/organizations that are already trying to deploy mobile messaging products or solutions, a survey shows that 63.17% of enterprises are already deploying mobile solutions, 27.04% of enterprises have not yet started deployment, and 9.79% of enterprises are not currently required. This set of data shows that enterprise mobility has reached the stage of landing and implementation.

For the revolutionary impact of mobile, before, Tian Chang information deputy general manager Tianwen has said, if the enterprise's OA, mailbox and other background applications continue to be the first stage, the enterprise application to increase GPS location positioning, camera cameras and other mobile characteristics as the second stage, then now, Enterprise mobile applications have entered the third stage-the industry chain matures, there are many key applications related to industry characteristics, many of these applications are even disruptive new business, some completely changed the original business processes and operating norms.

　　The convenience of enterprise mobile applications has been truly felt

Said the enterprise has opened the pace of mobile is not fictitious, the current mobile solutions for enterprises are mainly divided into two parts: one is the enterprise internal solution process and Office solutions, such as mobile office, mobile ERP, mobile CRM, etc., these in the enterprise has been very common, landing is relatively fast.

Another part of the enterprise for the end-user mobile solutions, can be further closer to the distance between customers and increase the business value of the enterprise. Such applications have been in the financial, insurance, catering, furniture and other industries have a mature application case. For example, the bank card does not need to fill out a paper form, the bank's staff hand-held tablet computer, according to the process of inputting user information, but also through the camera of the tablet directly to take photos of the user ID documents to archive. For the bank, not only environmental protection, accurate, but also greatly improve the efficiency of the card, the original one-month card time has now been shortened to two weeks or less.

For some insurance industry users, their salesman can only take the tablet computer site to introduce products to customers, can also fill in the field of electronic forms, directly into the back-end system, do not have to fill out the paper form, the same is very simple and efficient.

If you go to buy decoration materials, or go to the car 4S shop to buy high-grade cars, you can purchase good merchandise after the checkout link, immediately apply for large-amount consumer loans, resident bank staff can use the tablet computer on-site to accept consumer applications, the application and customer information in real-time transfer back to Headquarters, It is generally possible to complete a loan within 45 minutes.

From the current situation, the financial industry in the enterprise mobile sector in the forefront of the application. The emergence of successful applications has allowed many financial companies to make mobile applications an important foundation for improving the core competitiveness of banks.

　Enterprise application requirements are extensive, but application development is difficult

Gartner predicts that sales of global smartphones and tablets will exceed 1 billion units in 2013, including various operating systems, brands, and tens of thousands of different types of terminals in various models. How to enable developers to develop in the simplest way to meet a variety of mobile terminal applications, is placed in front of the developers a problem. is also the enterprise mobile should carefully consider the issue.

Surveys show that consumers spend more time (94 minutes/days) on mobile apps (including native and hybrid) than mobile web (72 minutes/day), so "mobile first" becomes a popular slogan for mobile development strategies. But in fact, mobile Web applications and mobile apps have their irreplaceable advantages, different mobile development models have successful cases, enterprises need to choose their own development path according to their own product and business attributes, mobile strategy and target user needs.

From the development of enterprise mobile applications, the current development model mainly includes native development, pure web development and hybrid development of three modes. Businesses often choose the right development model based on their business and actual application needs. The following key points to analyze the main advantages and disadvantages of these three development models, how enterprises make a clear choice to help enterprise users quickly realize the development of mobile applications and deployment work.

　　The native development mode of enterprise mobile development model

Native development (Native app) is a client application developed using certain development technologies (such as objective C) that users need to download the installation files to the mobile device and complete the installation before they can use their features.

Mobile Internet booming is the first mobile application in the form of each intelligent terminal, the user only need to easily enter the app. After the mobile app outbreak in 2009, this mobile application model gradually shifted from personal consumption application to enterprise mobile application, for this reason, the first wave of enterprise mobile informatization was dubbed "client application" development, because in the forefront of industry development, exploration is always accompanied by, so enterprises have adopted the model of native development, The advantages of native applications are obvious in the operational experience of mobile terminals. But companies quickly found that using native app as an app development model is difficult to continue to go on, whether it is the development cost, the new version of the upgrade and maintenance, client promotion and so on have encountered a lot of problems.

Key Benefits: The application experience is smoother and more stable to run. It's also easier to attract users from the app's design and experience.

The main deficiencies:

First of all, the original application development, updating, maintenance of the cycle is too long, coupled with the enterprise Mobile information is mostly in the trial and exploratory period, enterprises need to quickly launch different functions, products to adapt to market demand and change. Whether the enterprise own development or outsourcing will face the time cost, stability, experience can not meet the requirements of the great pressure.

Second, the native development (Native App) needs to have a high level of team as a guarantee, it is difficult for enterprises to specifically configure such developers, usually enterprises will spend hundreds of thousands of through the form of outsourcing development of one or two apps, but the enterprise will not think of the need to do hundreds of thousands of of the budget to maintain and update their apps. Not to update the app is not only difficult to meet the needs of users continue to grow, and even abandoned by users. So application update has become the bottleneck and problem of Enterprise mobile informatization. Do not update, the previous efforts are all wasted, updated, but also face the unbearable long-term investment pressure.

Thirdly, the promotion and download of mobile apps usually have a certain discount, many employees don't like to download and update the application, especially if the application experience is not good, the staff is more conflicted.

Therefore, in spite of some advantages in experience and performance, time cost and capital investment have become the great negative factor of the enterprise mobile Informatization brought by the development mode of native app. Really want to carry out mobile information enterprises, only in some of the needs of a small change in the specific business applications, such as mobile ERP, mobile CRM, and other focus on interaction and changes in demand is relatively large applications will abandon the native app this development model, and another find the road.

　　Pure web development of enterprise mobile development model

Web App development (web App) is a mobile app developed using technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that users access by entering the address of a Web site in a browser on a mobile device, without having to download and install any program, just like visiting a website on a computer.

Web applications in fact have existed for a long time, the early way through the WAP station to bring traffic to the enterprise, but the user experience and interaction is not ideal, the interface effect is poor. With the rise of HTML5 technology, new opportunities have been created for web development. Not only are some game companies developing Web-based mobile games, but businesses are also starting to develop web-based mobile apps that make the Web shine again.

Benefits of Web App development:

1, the development of low cost, will be web development programmers can easily get started mobile app development. 2, the development cycle is short. 3, easy to use users, only through the mobile browser can easily access. 4, the maintenance is simple, compared to the native app download installs as well as the subsequent unceasing maintenance upgrade, the Web mobile application superiority is obvious. 5, cross-platform, can guarantee the Web application on a variety of mobile terminal browsing effect.

The lack of WEB app development: platform stability and performance is relatively poor compared to native applications, and then the user experience is far less than the native application.

At present, the main application of the PC-B/S architecture application to the mobile phone end of the extension, can give users a seamless experience of mobile browser access. It is also biased towards some lightweight browser-based applications, such as information queries, browsing, or enterprise customer service applications, or enterprise sales and marketing applications.

However, due to the current operating experience of the browser re-entry operation of the smartphone is not as good as the native mobile app, which results in the native app occupying the user's mobile desktop and becoming the main portal, so that Web-based mobile applications do not receive much good results.

　　Hybrid development of Enterprise mobile application development model

The hybrid development model (hybrid mode) employs Web development technology while running in a native application shell. This application inherits the benefits of native and pure web development, which combines performance and security compared to pure web development, while taking into account the ease of development compared to native applications. As a result, the hybrid development model app combines the benefits of a native app with a good user interaction experience and web App cross-platform development.

From the implementation principle, the hybrid Development mode app (Hybrid app) is usually based on the third-party cross-platform mobile application engine framework for development, which is more well-known in the development platform of PhoneGap, Appcan, titanium and UF UAP Mobile and so on. These engine frameworks typically use HTML5 and JavaScript as programming languages, invoking the underlying features of the engine package such as cameras, sensors, contacts, QR codes, and so on. HTML5 and JavaScript are just as an analytic language, the real call is the native app like the underlying functionality of the package, which is the biggest difference and different from the Web App. Because browser technology is used, the hybrid app often has cross-platform features, and development costs are close to the Web app, and the development efficiency is much higher than the native app.

Many enterprises use Hybrid (Hybrid app) technology to develop mobile applications, on the one hand, development is simple, on the other hand can form a development standard. The enterprise encapsulates a large number of native Plugin (native plug-ins such as payment feature plug-ins) for JavaScript invocation and can be reused in future projects, significantly reducing development time and costs. Colleagues, the standardization of hybrid applications (Hybrid app) has brought great convenience to enterprise mobile application development, maintenance and update.

In addition, some mobile middleware platform is also a good hybrid development platform, mainly used in mobile phones, tablets and other mobile terminals on the application, and the original running on the PC on the back-end program to do docking, the middle of the complex development process encapsulated, so that the developer's development difficulty greatly reduced, the development efficiency rise up. If both ends of the program are newly written, the developer also needs a middleware to do both ends of the docking. Because the environment of the two ends is constantly changing, with middleware it weakens the impact of these changes on program development, making the development process less cumbersome.

Hybrid (Hybrid app) development has become the trend of enterprise mobile development, in investment, user experience, maintenance costs and other aspects of comprehensive consideration, hybrid (Hybrid app) app has been recognized by many enterprises. Even in the enterprise Mobile Information platform for the overall solution provider, almost all of the hybrid app as the preferred mobile application development model, including IBM Worklight, Appcan MEAP and SAP SUP platform, UF UAP Mobile, Nanjing Beacon, Digital Paradise, Sky information and so on.

A typical case based on mixed-mode development: ICBC, Baidu search, street side, Eastern airlines and so on.

　　Industry experts talk about application development model selection

For the mobile application development model, some enterprises have been groping for a long time, but also have their own experience and views. PICC Insurance CIO Xu Zhenhui said in an interview earlier that, overall, the company's mobile applications adopted a hybrid development model. However, different applications use the corresponding development model, such as business-related applications using the native development model, so as to ensure the user experience and stability. In applications for direct customers, web development is often used, and users can interact directly with the company via the Internet.

In the urgent improvement of enterprise service image, to avoid excessive events occurred in the civil aviation industry, also walk in the forefront of practice. Civil aviation IT expert Li Zhijun that the emergence of new technology enables airlines to use technological innovation to support the above two aspects of business thinking. From the strategy of mobile technology application, it can be laid out from the three angles of "internal", "external" and "internal and external integration".

1, for the "internal" application, Native app is a good choice. On the one hand, the efficiency of the application will be high, on the other hand, as an employee-oriented mobile application, this kind of application does not care whether there are more people to download the use, usually outside the enterprise people will not have access to these applications.

2, for the "external" application, as an important channel for the airline sales and service, marketing is a very important factor to consider. With the increasing use of mobile devices, the mobile version of the various types of search engines (including tourism search) the corresponding increase in users, then from the search engine traffic should be where to go? For airlines, a web app is a good choice, in fact, the traditional Internet in the field of mobile Internet mapping, the Web The app makes it possible for airline marketers to move many of the traditional internet marketing experience to the Mobile world.

From the user interface, the Native app can create a better traveler experience and can also use more features that are tightly integrated with mobile device features. Fortunately, however, with the continuous development of HTML5 technical specifications, WEB apps have developed greatly in the use of interface design and mobile features. The industry generally believes that Web apps will be a better choice for the global airline's sales and marketing business applications.

Zheng Yi Wireless President Wang Guochun that enterprises should need a standard third-party platform to solve the problems that enterprises encounter in mobile application development. The hybrid development model is more like a thinking, the hybrid application development pattern can be based on different development requirements for specific implementations, such as the need for native development, can be implemented in a native way, the need for Web-based development can be developed using HTML5.

Enterprise Mobile Development Model Survey Report: The hybrid development model occupies the mainstream

IT168 Research Center for more than 400 users, the deployment of Mobile information for enterprises to choose which development model of the survey found: 57.85% of enterprises Choose a hybrid development model. 22.77% of enterprise users choose native Development mode. 19.37% of enterprise users choose the Web development model. The results of this survey also confirmed that the current enterprise in the mobile development model selection of hybrid development model has become the mainstream.

The hybrid development model dominates the mainstream

Combined with the above mentioned three kinds of development models: native development, hybrid development, pure web development, draw their respective advantages and disadvantages of the comparison chart, only for you to learn and reference.

▲ three different development mode comparison chart