It discusses how to get the most out of smartphones and tablets in a fast changing consumer device driven “BYOD” environment and also explores some of the challenges of implementing enterprise mobility – explaining some of the new approaches that a mobility platform can bring.

1. Implementing a mobile project
is no small task. The evergrowing choice of devices
available, the complexity of
back-end integration and the
rapid evolution of mobile
technologies can make it look
like a daunting challenge to the
most experienced of project
managers.
Since Appear helped pioneer the
mobile workforce revolution
back in 2001, we have been
assisting major corporations to
pilot and roll-out their mobile
solutions. From these
assignments we have
highlighted these key
takeaways.
ENTERPRISE
MOBILITY 2.0
Cloud Based, Cross-Platform and
Context-Aware
An Appear White Paper

2. INTRODUCTION
The revolution brought about by smartphones and tablets offer more choice, better
technology and lower prices to the enterprise, thus allowing the support of new and
innovative applications that boost productivity, improve service levels and lower TCO.
But this consumerization of the enterprise mobility market has left companies scrambling
for steady ground, as the market for consumer devices is significantly larger and more
dynamic than historically the case with the industrial grade rugged devices.
”
This illustrates why it has become increasingly
”Betting on any specific
challenging for enterprises to come up with a long
hardware platform has
term mobility strategy for their business. Clearly
become a significant risk
betting on any specific hardware platform has
for continuity”
become a significant risk for continuity and
competitiveness. However, there is sufficient data
now to spot a few trends and best practices to benefit from.
”
We are also seeing the rise of cloud offerings that help reduce upfront investments and
operational cost significantly. This has been a trend for a while with SaaS offerings like
SalesForce and Office 365, but mobility has
”The anywhere and anytime accelerated this development further because
the anywhere and anytime access that cloud
access that cloud offers is
offers is especially relevant for mobile users.
especially relevant for
This has led to additional cloud offerings aimed
mobile users”
specifically at enterprise mobility, e.g. MBaaS.
ENTERPRISE MOBILITY 2.0
In only the last few years, we have seen BlackBerry go from dominating the enterprise
market to becoming a niche player with an uncertain future, while iOS took over briefly
before yielding to the broader market reach of Android, though facing fragmentation
challenges. We have seen WebOS fail to take off, MeeGo reincarnate as Tizen, and the
first device running FireFox OS. We are starting to see Windows Phone gain market share,
and yet a mixed reception of Windows 8 tablets. After smartphones and tablets, we see
the rise of new wearable form factors like glasses and wrist watches that can support new
use cases. It likely won’t end there.
But not all enterprise mobility initiatives have been equally successful. Usability issues,
privacy concerns, lack of agility or expertise, all can lead to expensive failures.
”
Enterprise Mobility poses unique challenges regarding battery life, connectivity, usability,
life cycle management, screen real estate,
security, cost and continuity.
”Enterprise mobility poses
unique challenges”
In addition, every vertical industry has its own
unique challenges, due to the nature of the
work, environment, regulations and the technical literacy of its people.
Let’s have a closer look at some of these challenges and risks and how a mobility platform
could help you address them today, while preparing you for what is yet to come.
1

3. BATTERY LIFE
”
Employees need to be able to complete an entire work shift on a single battery charge, as
most consumer devices do not offer battery
replacement options.
”Most consumer devices do
not offer battery
Battery stamina does however not only depend
on its capacity but also on consumption. While
replacement options”
mobile devices all implement advanced power
savings features, much of the savings depend on usage and application efficiency. The
biggest consumers are generally screen backlight, wireless radio (Wifi, 3G/4G) and CPU.
The first step is therefore to choose the right device for the job, by performing some field
testing on them with real-world work usage patterns.
ENTERPRISE MOBILITY 2.0
Regardless of the chosen hardware, and the performance power it may have, by ensuring
that heavy operations are offloaded to the server, a mobility platform can help save on
battery and support more cost effective hardware specifications.
Efficient file synchronization and integration connectors that allow for server side
optimization of backend data, can significantly reduce the amount of data having to travel
“across the wire” between mobile applications and backend systems, thus saving on
wireless transmissions that significantly impact power consumption.
It is also important that event driven mechanisms, including push messaging rather than
polling, are utilized to minimize unnecessary CPU cycles while ensuring fast
synchronization of relevant data, even when the device is in standby modus.
”
And finally, contextual information could be used to exchange only data relevant to a
particular application, user, task or moment.
This includes eliminating steps in a workflow
”This would mean time and
that are irrelevant or can be completed
power savings on all aspects
automatically with contextual information,
of device usage”
thus simplifying and reducing the number of
device interactions required to compete a
task. This would mean time and power savings on all aspects of device usage.
CONNECTIVITY
2
The consumerization of the enterprise market also means many enterprise deployments
are starting to use public 3G/4G networks as their primary or only method of
connectivity.
Aside from the security impact, for the foreseeable future there will remain many areas
where mobile network coverage is suboptimal or absent, such as in buildings, elevators,

4. tunnels or remote sites. For public network operated devices it is therefore common for
connections to drop many times throughout the day.
”
Nothing is more frustrating and wasteful for employees than having to enter a large
amount of data, while serving a waiting customer, and receive connectivity related errors
or even loss of that data.
Indeed, many mobile applications become
instantly useless as soon as connectivity drops.
”Many applications become
instantly useless as soon as
connectivity drops”
But it is not only about the complete absence
of connectivity. It’s also about performance as
the actual bandwidth available for cellular 3G/4G networks can vary between 0% and
roughly 60% of what is theoretically possible, due to signal quality or network load.
By implementing efficient background file synchronization, the mobile platform will have
more time to send less data. This will optimize the use of available bandwidth significantly
while keeping the applications responsive.
”
”Enable applications to
continue working as usual
even in the temporary
absence of connectivity”
With Offline application support, the mobile
platform can enable applications to continue
working as usual even in the temporary absence
of connectivity. It can do so by performing
requested operations on local data, while
synchronizing the changes to the backend
whenever possible.
ENTERPRISE MOBILITY 2.0
There are several ways in which an enterprise mobility platform can help applications
offer a more consistent, reliable and responsive user experience, despite inconsistent
network performance.
Think of data collection activities like incident reports, time reports, sales transactions,
download of files, etc. Applications could just “fire and forget”, and move on to the next
task, while relying on the platform to complete those transaction with the back end as
soon as possible.
This requires the mobility platform to implement a certain transaction model that
guarantees the integrity and security of the data while it is stored on the device,
processes the transactions in the proper order, mitigates any synchronization issues with
the backend and offers applications the option to track the status of these transactions
through notifications.
”
”Context information could be
To further optimize the reliability and
performance of applications, context
leveraged to anticipate the
information could be leveraged to
dependency on resources
anticipate the dependency on resources
ahead of time”
ahead of time. By initiating a pre-fetch of
required data briefly before it is needed,
the time window for successful retrieval could be significantly increased, making it less
prone to local dead spots or reduced bandwidth. In addition it would significantly boost
3

5. ”
user perceived performance as the data will have already been cached locally on the
device the moment it is requested.
As Wi-Fi remains heavily used in enterprise
environments and increasingly in public spaces,
enterprise mobility platforms must ensure that
switching between different connectivity methods
is seamless and transparent to applications, active
file transfers and authenticated sessions.
USABILITY
”Ensure that switching
between different
connectivity methods is
seamless and transparent”
ENTERPRISE MOBILITY 2.0
Usability is important to enterprise mobility, as it impacts user adoption, productivity and
satisfaction levels. It can affect data quality and even employee health (RSI).
Not only are enterprise applications expected to offer a reliable and consistent user
experience, they are expected to do so with the same levels of accessibility and usability
as consumer applications.
Gone are the days that enterprise applications could get away with clunky user interfaces
that cramped up as much information on that tiny screen as possible, while still being
able to operate it with a stylus.
If users can’t swipe it, they won’t like it. And it makes perfect sense since these finger
operated interactions are far more intuitive.
Most popular web services are extended with mobile client applications on all major
platforms, allowing users the freedom and convenience to access these services anytime,
anywhere and on almost any device.
That the same level of flexibility and accessibility will benefit enterprises, is illustrated by
that fact that many employees reach for alternative devices, such as laptops or personal
smartphones, to complete their tasks after batteries in their corporate devices have died.
”
In fact, a Forrester’s Forrsights Workforce Employee Survey in Q4, 2011 among 9.900
information workers in 19 different countries, already revealed 74% used 2 or more
devices for work and 52% used 3 or more. Same survey
also revealed that 60% is used for both work and
”74% used 2 or more
personal purposes.
devices for work”
These numbers continue to rise, as more organizations
recognize the benefits of supporting a heterogeneous
fleet of devices. It not only allows different user groups to receive different devices that
are better suited for their particular tasks, but also multiple devices per user. In fact, most
organizations already complement their tablet deployment with smart phones for voice
communication and email, but do not yet leverage them beyond that.
 Forrester
4

6. Part of the problem is that usability requirements and feature sets can be very different
on these devices, making multi-platform design and development complex and costly.
That is why many enterprise mobile applications still require large tablets to operate
conveniently, as they continue to display too much data and require too many user
interactions to complete a task. Even if the same could fit on a smaller screen, it would
make these applications hard to operate.
And of course not all applications, such as those operating barcode scanners, can run on
all devices. An inventory application that makes use of missing features, may fail to
launch and prevent access to the rest of the application functionality.
So user interface optimizations alone can only do so much. Not to forget that enterprise
applications can be very data intensive while data entry on most mobile devices remains
more cumbersome than using a full size hardware keyboard and mouse on an office PC.
It can enable applications to display only relevant data for a particular user at a particular
time, reducing the amount of “noise” that users must sift through to find what they need.
”
It can help reduce the number of steps a user must perform to complete a task, by more
intelligently anticipating and further
automating steps in a workflow.
Having employees spend less time typing,
searching, tapping and scrolling, means
more time is spent on the task at hand.
”Reduce the number of steps a
user must perform to
complete a task”
ENTERPRISE MOBILITY 2.0
A mobile platform with context-awareness can help applications much more easily and
consistently detect device features, tasks requirements, user preferences and other
environmental conditions, regardless of the source of these parameters.
Less data to display or enter also means the available screen real-estate can support
larger font sizes or UI elements to improve legibility and (single hand) operation.
”
Context-support can greatly simplify the implementation of flexible and efficient
applications and is expected to become even more relevant with the upcoming wave of
wearable devices, like smart
glasses and watches.
” The need for context awareness in
mobile applications has increased with
the capabilities of mobile devices”
These smaller devices are
expected to have a huge
impact on the enterprise
market, in areas like health
 Gartner
care, public safety, inspection
and B2C solutions, but will require smarter interfaces to humans and backend systems to
make optimal use of them.
The ease by which these new devices can be evaluated and adopted will greatly enhance
an organization’s competitive advantage.
“
Most consumer devices do not
offer battery replacement
5

7. APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT
The app revolution in the consumer space has led to hundreds of thousands of
applications for all sorts of purposes. Enterprises can benefit from a similar approach,
where, instead of single or few large monolithic stand-alone applications, multiple smaller
applications (or even so-called widgets) are built to support specific tasks. This modularity
greatly simplifies the development and maintenance of applications, while improving the
agility to support new business needs as they come.
”
For enterprise apps, we often see the same business data being needed by multiple
applications. Since about 50% of the cost associated with
the development of enterprise applications is spent on
”50% of the cost is
integration efforts, it is critical that enterprise mobility
associated with
platforms reduce this effort and prevent its duplication for
integration efforts”
each application, let alone for each hardware platform.
ENTERPRISE MOBILITY 2.0
That brings us to the subject of cross platform development:
While generally native development is better optimized for the hardware it runs on, and
offers more responsive applications, cross-platform solutions ensure wider adoption,
faster development, more continuity, easier maintenance and significant cost savings.
The leading trend in enterprise mobility is towards capturing the best of both worlds by
using a hybrid approach.
”
Gartner predicts that by 2016, more than 50% of all applications will be hybrid.
”By 2016, more than 50% of all
applications will be hybrid”

Gartner
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2324917
“The advantages of the hybrid
architecture, which combines the
portability of HTML5 Web apps
with a native container that
facilitates access to native device
features, will appeal to many
enterprises.” -- Gartner (2013)
But most hybrid platforms either offer a standard container with limited access to native
features, based on the lowest-common-denominator, or generate multiple platform
specific binaries that make the solution less portable and may complicate debugging and
application management across a heterogeneous fleet of devices.
6
A more complete and flexible hybrid approach would let developers not only build crossplatform solutions on a standard set of native features, but also enable them to extend
this set of features with application modules and shared services that require native
performance, or additional platform specific features such as new sensors, barcode
scanners, bluetooth printers or other custom peripherals.
By implementing context-awareness, applications can easily detect and use these
optional features, while maintaining their cross platform functionality on other platforms
or customized containers that lack them.

8. In addition, to get developers up to speed faster, and reduce vendor lock-in, an enterprise
mobility platform should build on and facilitate the use of standard frameworks and
development tools as much as possible. Allowing developers the freedom and flexibility
to use what they already know and like, will make them productive faster than having to
learn yet another set of proprietary tools that require extensive training.
And finally, an enterprise mobility platform should facilitate agile development processes
with a set of tools, roles and policies that ease the collaboration between developers and
stakeholders.
LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT
If a major bug was found after deployment, that was somehow not caught in automated
or even field tests, the impact on operations was significant as the whole logistical
process had to be repeated.
”
To stay competitive, your mobility strategy needs to ensure that you stay ahead of rapid
changes in the market and adapt to new
business needs.
A reduction of cost and overhead can be
achieved by introducing more agility to
shorten the development, test and
deployment cycles.
”Your mobility strategy needs
to ensure that you stay ahead
of rapid changes”
ENTERPRISE MOBILITY 2.0
Traditionally, rolling out an upgrade to an application required major logistical operations,
possibly spanning several months of collecting, cradling or otherwise interrupting
operations while downloading and testing large file sets over slow networks.
Splitting enterprise needs into smaller modular applications will make it easier to add
new features and support new use cases and user groups, without growing the
complexity of individual applications too much over time.
But this approach needs to be complemented with a way to easily deploy and update
those applications in the field, as inability to do so will force longer test cycles and
increased maintenance overhead.
While public app stores have made it easier for consumers to discover, deploy and update
applications, enterprises will need finer control over who can discover these apps, and
not be faced with a possibly time consuming or unsuccessful approval process.
In addition to enabling users to discover optional apps themselves, an enterprise mobility
platform should allow enterprises to enable automatic discovery of certain mandatory or
contextually relevant applications and updates, such as critical bug fixes.
7

9. ”
It is however also critical that these automatic updates do not interrupt the operations of
individual users in the field. A mobility platform
could for example allow large updates to be
”it’s critical that automatic
downloaded in off-hours, and applied only when
updates do not interrupt
applications are not being actively used. In case
operations in the field”
an application is in use, the platform could notify
the user of a pending update with a non-intrusive message.
Fortunately, hybrid platforms and modularization can ensure that individual applications
maintain a very small footprint, making their updates in the field more quick and efficient.
ENTERPRISE MOBILITY 2.0
With lifecycles of consumer devices being generally shorter, and pricing ever more
competitive, enterprises should be prepared to migrate users to new platforms as
needed, either because there is no other option at that time, to support new use cases or
otherwise getting more value for money.
Because many users may find big changes disruptive to their daily routine, resistance to
such changes might prevent a successful rollout. By ensuring that mobile applications can
maintain their common look & feel across multiple platforms, hardware changes can be
decoupled from software changes, allowing enterprises to exercise finer control over the
overall change process and the impact on their users.
SECURITY
Initially, consumerization was met with fear rather than opportunity, at IT management
level. This led to investments in MDM tools that focused primarily on controlling and
disabling users and devices, rather than embracing and enabling them.
Security is absolutely critical to enterprise mobility, and the invasion of personal devices
into the enterprise domain has raised valid concerns. But a good enterprise mobility
strategy cannot be based on a general sense of insecurity and uncertainty. Enterprises
must investigate the real threats to their business. A good enterprise mobility strategy is
characterized by maximizing business value, while ensuring the most valuable business
assets, its data, is kept secure. That should be the primary responsibility of the mobility
platform.
8
”
This understanding is especially key to supporting BYOD. Remarkably enough, this
concept is not new. Your bank has long understood that they must be able to offer a great
e-banking experience, without requiring you to
”Remarkably enough, this
only use bank issued laptops or letting them
take full control of your personal devices.
concept is not new”
Certainly any attempt to do so, would make the

10. number of satisfied customers significantly drop, making this valuable service
unsustainable. Much can be learned from its similarities with enterprise mobility.
But there are also differences. While banks have more to fear from phishing or skimming
practices, enterprises have to worry more about the loss or theft of these devices that
allow access to sensitive data.
”
The best approach is to assume that mobile devices are by definition always insecure. The
focus of enterprise mobility should therefore be to implement a secure environment on
an otherwise insecure platform, rather
”Enterprise security is about data,
than trying to secure the entire platform
itself. In other words, enterprise security
not devices”
is about data, not devices.
This container should implement encrypted storage and transmission, and offer flexible,
secure and extendible multi-step authentication mechanisms that can be centrally
managed, ideally integrated with existing corporate directory services.
This flexibility will allow enterprises to not only find the best balance between usability
and the sensitivity of the data that needs to be secured, but also ensure new and
improved authentication mechanisms can be implemented when necessary, such as NFC
readers, biometric scanners or anything else, without it having to impact existing
applications or integrations.
”
ENTERPRISE MOBILITY 2.0
This can be accomplished by using a secure enterprise container application that holds all
enterprise data, and can only be accessed by authorized users and applications within
that container.
In addition, enterprise mobility solutions should minimize the number of integration
points. Ideally, the only way both users and
”The only way both users and applications can access enterprise data, is
through the secure container. And the only
applications can access
way the container can access backend
enterprise data, is through
systems, is through a single secure tunnel to
the secure container”
the cloud platform. This will greatly simplify
management, monitoring and configuration of corporate policies and firewalls.
And in case devices are lost or stolen, it should be easy for users and enterprises to locate
these devices and remote wipe all sensitive data. However, it is important to privacy
regulations and user adoption, that without the consent of the end user, enterprises
should only be able to wipe corporate data.
9

11. CONTINUITY
”
A good enterprise mobility strategy will support business continuity over a longer period
of time.
”A good enterprise mobility
This does not mean that you should
prevent the use of vendor specific features
strategy will support business
that can help your business save money
continuity over a longer
and keep you competitive, but it does
period of time”
mean that if the need arises, there should
be a feasible and cost effective vendor platform migration strategy.
”
ENTERPRISE MOBILITY 2.0
The first strategy is to ensure the use of open standards such as HTML5, to reduce lock in
on any particular platform or vendor.
”What hasn’t been implemented,
doesn’t need to be migrated”
The second strategy is to reduce the
amount of code required to build
functional applications. After all, what
hasn’t been implemented doesn’t
need to be migrated or written off.
The third strategy is to ensure full ownership of applications and backend data.
With a public cloud platform, the latter can be easily achieved if the platform allows a
hybrid cloud approach, where your backend applications and data, as well as the
connectors to them, can be implemented and hosted on premise or private cloud.
CONCLUSION
While defining an effective enterprise mobility strategy can be a daunting task, we hope that
the awareness of some of the main challenges and their potential solutions, as outlined in this
document, can assist enterprises to a successful deployment.
The challenges are however not only technical. A successful mobility strategy requires synergy
between vendors, integrators and power users, who not only understand mobility, but also
the challenges specific to your business.
10

12. ABOUT APPEAR
As an enterprise mobility software pioneer since 2001, Appear has developed extensive
experience and expertise with innovative award-winning context-aware enterprise
mobility solutions deployed in areas such as public transport, dealing with every aspect of
mobility in the most literal sense of the word.
Appear Networks Systems AB, Kista Science Tower, 164 51 Kista, Sweden
Phone: +46(0)854591370 Web: www.appearnetworks.com
ENTERPRISE MOBILITY 2.0
contact info@appearnetworks.com
11