Companies Plan To Spend Big On Mobility As They Seek To Boost Collaborative Work

Almost all IT decision makers (90 percent) expect to increase spending on mobile app development.

This was the finding of a survey by open Source solution specialist, Red Hat, which also found that they predict their organisations’ investment for mobile application development increasing at an average growth rate of 24 percent during the same period.

Mobile app strategies

The 2015 Red Hat mobile maturity survey follows findings from two years ago by app development platform provider, FeedHenry (acquired by Red Hat in October 2014). According to FeedHenry’s 2013 survey, only seven percent of respondents from 100 UK companies with 1,000 or more employees indicated their companies had a fully implemented mobile app strategy. Now, 52 percent of respondents to Red Hat’s 2015 survey claim to have a fully implemented strategy, signaling a rise in the importance of mobility as the pace of development accelerates. Further, respondents’ organisations plan to develop on average 21 custom apps each over the next two years, a 40 percent increase over the average number of custom apps developed in the last two years.
As companies invest in mobile strategies, they are shifting towards a collaborative approach in which the line of business can play a greater role in decision-making alongside IT. They are also seeking to adopt newer, more agile technologies to best tackle mobile development and integration such as Mobile Backend-as-a-Service (MBaas) and lightweight languages, according to Red Hat.

Cathal McGloin, VP, Mobile Platforms, Red Hat, said: “Organisations are realising the importance of mobile strategies. We’re seeing a shift towards more mature practices such as collaboration across business and IT teams, as well as recognition of the importance of open source software, MBaaS technology and lightweight languages. Based on the mobility maturity survey, we anticipate mobile application development will increase over the next two years as there’s still room for mobile approaches to mature in the enterprise.”

Red Hat commissioned research firm Vanson Bourne to poll the views of IT decision makers from 200 companies across the US and Western Europe. Key insights include:

• The transformative power of mobile is important as organisations mature. One-third (35 percent) of respondents say mobile apps change the way they do business by reinventing business processes and an additional 37 percent say apps are primarily used to automate existing processes. Still, 24 percent of respondents are mobilising existing web applications, showing potential for further maturity in their approaches.

• More than one-third (37 percent) of respondents have instituted a collaborative Mobile Center of Excellence (MCoE). More than half (55 percent) of respondents whose organisations have an implemented and fully reviewed mobile app strategy have a MCoE in place. This can signal improved mobile maturity as IT and lines of business work together to improve workforce productivity and consumer engagement.

• Companies are embracing open source software and MBaaS technology. An overwhelming (85) percent of survey respondents say open source software is important to their app development strategy. Moreover, to tackle back-end integration, MBaaS technology is used by nearly one-third (31 percent) of respondents. This number is anticipated to grow to 36 percent in the next two years.

• A new era of lightweight languages has arrived. One-quarter (26 percent) of respondents plan to primarily use Node.js as their language for back-end development within the next two years, while 15 percent plan to primarily use Java and 19 percent plan to primarily use .NET. Currently, 71 percent of respondents are primarily using Java while 56 percent use .NET.

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