Create mobile apps that are actually part of your business

For several years, most IT organizations have been focused on treating mobile devices as risks to contain or manage. But some have focused on mobile as an opportunity to provide or extend business value. Because the IT focus has been on security, hundreds of mobile security vendors are out there. But there’s much less available in terms of capabilities to enable the use of mobile for constructive purposes.

As a result, mobile apps ironically remain underdeveloped in the enterprise. There are plenty of tools to create mobile apps, of course, but these tools are designed for self-contained apps or apps that tap into cloud-delivered services — resulting in apps that barely tap into enterprises’ core data and systems. That perpetuates the notion that IT manages only inwardly focused “back office” core systems, while business units and outside developers are where you get the new “front office” capabilities. That’s not good for IT — or for your business.

[ Check out InfoWorld’s PDF Digital Spotlight: Enterprise mobile app strategies that work. | How PaaS is changing enterprise app dev. | 10 cutting-edge mobile development tools. | Keep up on key mobile developments and insights with the Mobilize newsletter. ]

But some technologies are available for creating useful, valuable mobile apps that are actually part of your business. One venue for them is Force.com, which leverages Salesforce.com’s customer relationship management (CRM) software to let businesses create real business apps. For example, Coca-Cola Enterprises, the European Coke distributor, uses Force.com modules in mobile apps that help its roving sales and distribution employees better serve customers by using sales data.

Another venue should be your core in-house systems, such as your enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems or other transactional systems, including e-commerce, distribution, or supply-chain management. The problem is, such systems live in technological silos designed to keep them safe, consistent, and self-contained. The notion of federating data or services is alien to their architecture. Yes, there are integration methods, but they’re typically pipelined extract/import methods, passing data from one system to another.

A decade ago, the services-oriented architecture (SOA) approach had a brief moment in the sun, marketed as a way to create apps from services assembled on the fly using standard APIs. “Legacy” back-end services woud be wrapped in ways that let them interact to some degree with these flexible, composed apps.

But SOA quickly became another monolith: As organizations struggled with managing all those services, they began to combine them into more complex but fewer modules, managed through enterprise service buses. It was good old middleware with a fancy new name. As a result, the promised explosion in Web apps didn’t happen. A few industries used them to expose reports and basic customer data in dashboard-like apps, but Web apps à la SOA didn’t really happen.

Today, mobile apps are the new Web apps, but with a twist: They run on truly different devices — mobile devices. That’s important because it was easy for most IT organizations to create a simple .Net or Java application for computer users rather than create browser-based Web services. Windows was Windows, while browsers varied widely. And browsers didn’t have the richness of a Windows for client apps.

Mobile devices are so different that this “one native client” approach just doesn’t work, despite the efforts of companies like Citrix Systems to try to run Windows apps on iPads, iPhones, and Androids via virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technology.

Suddenly the SOA notion makes sense again — composing functions on the fly separate from the presentation layer. In the 1980s, when object orientation and client/server were the new “Aha!” revelations, the closest equivalent was the model-view-controller (MVC) approach. By separating these three aspects of applications, developers could create apps that ran across different environments in a federated style,

Well, MVC is back in mobile even if in Web apps the use of languages like JavaScript still mix up the “V” and “C,” making it harder to use the true SOA approach. Yes, I know MVC is baked into the development frameworks from Microsoft, Apple, and others — but once you start working across applications, you rarely use a single development environment, and MVC adherence tends to fall away.

Forrester Research, which is in my opinion the savviest general analyst firm when it comes to mobile issues, proposes what it calls a four-tier architecture — client, delivery, aggregation, and services — for mobile apps that is a good model for thinking about your business-enabling mobile app efforts. It’s the services part that most businesses don’t understand, but could unlock if they understood the SOA approach.

All of this brings me to a company named ClearBlade. It’s an example of the kind of technology that in-house enterprise developers and their IT colleagues should be examining to have their mobile apps tap into their core systems. You can think of ClearBlade as providing the on-premises mechanism for IT to use its core systems as the sources for the enterprise’s own mobile services. Commercial developers now routinely use mobile-back-end-as-a-service (MBaaS) offerings to bring functionality into their apps, for everything from sales tax calculation to error capture.

IT has no similar way to deliver its own functionality to its mobile apps. As CEO Eric Simone tells me, “SOA is not built for mobile devices — the protocols and messages are different.” As a result, you can’t use SOA’s inherent integration, composition, and federation techniques to extend your core applications to mobile contexts, or easily enable interactions between mobile apps and core systems.

Using techniques like RESTful APIs isn’t enough for such integration, even if it is a useful component of your integration. After all, having APIs doesn’t mean you have an architecture in which to wisely use them. In the federated world of mobile apps, that architecture brings us back to the MVC model, whether you’re using MBaaS, enterprise PaaS, and/or something else to provide the functional components.

“MVC is a lost art, but it very much the way we need to build everything,” Simone says. “Through the proliferation of new technologies like JavaScript, we’ve bastardized the notion of separation of concerns that is fundamental to MVC. We need to separate server side from client side, and we need to have the right APIs for them to interact.” As you would expect, he believes ClearBlade has the technology to do that.

“The real issue in enterprises that we see is access to core data. Cloud-oriented MBaaS is great when you’re building new apps and just displaying data, usually based on a cleaned feed provided from IT,” he says. But as you start interacting with multiple cloud services, “you get sync issues and lose control of the feed sent to the third-party service that feeds the mobile app.” Simone says this is not an MBaaS-specific issue — in fact, it applies to any cloud service, whether used in mobile apps, Web apps, desktop apps, and embedded systems such as the emerging Internet of things devices.

But there’s more to the enterprise mobile app than managing inputs and outputs among services. “Systems of record must be secure and must have controls. But access is critical for higher-functioning mobile apps, such as for sales or order-taking. There are lots of fears about opening up directly to mobile. The issue is that there is a gap between what the mobile devices can do and what controls are needed,” Simone says.

MBaaS is a way to provide the middleware to address that, he adds. For example, most compliance rules are not technical but procedural, needing to validate or audit this or that. “It’s much easier to do that from behind the firewall. On the mobile side, [tools like ClearBlade’s] interact with mobile management tools that handle the device protocols or implement their own in containers,” he says.

I can’t tell you if ClearBlade is the right tool set for building your enterprise apps. But it points to a gap that many businesses have in exploiting the value of mobile devices for their employees and customers. IT needs to focus on how to make mobile a real part of its technology environment, not just its security fabric. To do that, it needs to look for tools and methods that let its business’s developers tap into the core systems with tools that allow the rapid development of the mobile world and ensure secure, stable integration.

This article, “Create mobile apps that are actually part of your business,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.