Mobile SaaS: A Way to Jumpstart Mobile Enterprise App Deployment?

Mobile applications might be in the headlines thanks to ever-faster networks and high-profile, capable endpoints like the ubiquitous iPhone, but the reality is that more than 95 percent of enterprises have yet to extend their in-house applications/data/transactions to the mobile environment. The reason is a bit pedestrian: the enterprise market might be a huge untapped market crying out to be untethered, but it’s also one that faces a whole raft of back-office challenges. Reality trumps coolness: that’s lately been the sad reality of the mobile app world.

The issue at hand is not just in developing the applications themselves — the industry seems to be working hard on that side of the equation, with open development ecosystems for BlackBerry, iPhone, Symbian, and Android and other Linux variations springing up like mushrooms after a rain. Rather, the issue is how to provision, service and maintain those applications across a variety of form factors, networks and operating systems.

“Essentially, the question to ask is how can we address the fundamental problem that we have a large number of fragmented device ecosystems?” explained Will Wang Graylin, CEO at ROAM Data Inc., which has created a mobile computing architecture for extending enterprise apps to the handset. The first fruit is an m-commerce application for direct sales and multilevel marketing companies. “Right now you have two mainstream options: the client-server approach, or delivering applications through a mobile browser.”

The traditional client-server approach requires an application to have a client for each specific OS (which has to be updated with every OS tweak), and it requires carrier-specific certification. There’s also the issue of scalability on the server side. For companies with hundreds or thousands of users, the prospect of serving mobile applications to a diverse set of devices requires a significant investment in backend integration, IT development, maintenance and support resources — all cost centers that just might not get the green light given all the other priorities. “The sheer complexity is a gating factor,” said Graylin.

As for allowing access to applications via a Web browser, the mobile browser experience just isn’t good enough or secure enough, he added. “Besides, a large number of workers still only have feature phones with no 3G and/or very limited browsing capabilities,” he noted. “How do we serve that segment?”

ROAM’s approach is a hybrid that only can be described as mobile SaaS — a sparsely inhabited nascent market. It takes a managed service approach, using a thin client and push/pull functionality, to deliver enterprise applications with a minimal amount of invasion into corporate IT infrastructure. It also requires little to no expertise on the part of the user.