What are Mobile Apps?
Mobile Apps are applications or services that can be downloaded and installed to a mobile device, rather than being rendered within a browser, which helps to meet personal use or business requirements for the user. The app may pull content and data from the Internet, in similar fashion to a website, or it may download the content so that it can be accessed without an Internet connection. A mobile app may be a mobile Website bookmarking utility, a mobile-based instant messaging client, Gmail for mobile, and many other applications.
The small-business demographic is pushing the envelope when it comes to mobile technology adoption. The fact is that they have really being doing so for the last decade.
The Corporate Mobile App Strategy Survey, published by partnerpedia.com, found that 78 per cent of the large companies with 500 employees or more had a desire to purchase apps. Of those, 90.2 per cent intend to buy mobile solutions for use by employees, while 43.9 per cent wanted apps for customers. The survey, which also included responses from companies with less than 500 employees, found that 22 per cent are buying apps for contractors.
And, close to 40 percent of small-business owners are using five more mobile apps to run their business, according to an ongoing survey conducted by J2 Global.
The number of mobile business apps - some cloud-based, some residing on the device - is proliferating. We can expect to see even more being developed as a result of the new HTML 5 standard, says David Bradshaw, a research manager at analyst IDC. HTML 5 makes it possible to develop apps simultaneously for different mobile platforms, so that a business that chooses to roll out a sales app. There are also a growing number of apps designed specifically for mobile use. These can be very generic or targeted at particular sectors.
Business Advantages of Mobile Apps:
If personal mobile phones and tablets are now an integral part of working life, how can enterprises turn this to business advantage? Many organisations have started carefully, by allowing employees to access the firm's email and calendar applications from their mobile devices. Even this can save time and money.
The advantage of an enterprise app store is that the IT function can configure apps appropriately before they are downloaded, and create blacklists or whitelists of apps for users. Bet9ja Mobile IT then has a single point from which to manage the provisioning and decommissioning of apps and the implementation of security policies.
However, most of the companies allow users to choose their own Mobile Apps, because users understand their own needs better than the IT function. Whichever approach is chosen, it is still hugely important to put security policies in place to protect corporate data by adopting an effective Mobile Device Management Solution.
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