What happens when wireless connectivity and mobile applications are no longer a novelty? What will enterprise mobility companies talk about? Already SAP's acquisition of Sybase has made the discussion of MEAPs (mobile enterprise application platforms) passé. Enterprise mobility vendors will announce their support for leading MEAPs, much like announcing their support for various OSs, and the discussion will move on to more interesting topics.
What is the real value and next big thing that enterprise mobility vendors will bring to the market in 2011? I propose that the values will come in the following areas:
- Location based services
- Mobile and real time business intelligence
- Workforce and asset tracking
- Mobile knowledge management and mobile decision collaboration
- Integration of social networking into mobile business applications.
- Integration of sales and marketing solutions with mobile field force automation solutions - the service technician can be your best marketing and sales person.
- More extensive use of digital photos and videos in mobile work environments for training, compliance documentation, trouble shooting and assistance.
- Dynamic and intra-day route planning and workforce scheduling.
- Development and implementation of mobile workflows and business processes (not just extending ERP processes outward).
- Mobile payments, mobile banking and mobile money
- Expansion of mobile augmented reality into mobile business applications, mobile field service applications and mobile marketing.
- Incorporating deep vertical expertise and industry best practices into mobile solutions.
- Context aware mobile applications that predict your needs and proactively provide you with the right information, at the right time and in the right place to make your job and life easier.
- Networked field services
- Much more M2M (machine to machine) communications.
Note that all of these mobile solutions will continue to require a mobility platform, but the platform is not the interesting part of the discussion or solution. I am positive there are more items that need to be added to this list so please comment below with any items that I missed.
