With enterprises under extreme pressure from management and employees to develop and deploy mobile applications to accommodate mobile work styles and increase customer engagement, Gartner, Inc. predicts that more than 50 percent of mobile apps deployed by 2016 will be hybrid.
“Mobility has always been a separate topic for IT professionals, but it is now influencing mainstream strategies and tactics in the wider areas of technology enablement and enterprise architectures,” said Ken Dulaney, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, in a statement. “Increasingly, enterprises are finding that they need to support multiple platforms, especially as the [bring your own device] BYOD trend gains momentum.”
To address the need for mobile applications, enterprises are looking to leverage applications across multiple platforms. 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.
The need for context awareness in mobile applications has increased with the capabilities of mobile devices, causing developers to consider both hybrid and native architectures. For applications to leverage location information, notification systems, mapping capabilities and even on-device hardware such as the camera, the applications need to be developed using either hybrid or native architectures. This has caused enterprise developers to consider alternatives to Web application development.
“Our advice would be to assume the enterprise will have to manage a large and diverse set of mobile applications that will span all major architectures,” said Van Baker, research vice president at Gartner, in the press release. “Enterprises should consider how applications can be enriched or improved by the addition of native device capabilities and evaluate development frameworks that offer the ability to develop native, hybrid and Web applications using the same code base. Where possible, development activities should be consolidated via cross-platform frameworks.”
Gartner outlined two additional key predictions around mobility and the enterprise:
By 2014, Apple will be as accepted by enterprise IT as Microsoft is today.
“Although Apple’s mobile iPhone and iPads are already as accepted by enterprise IT as is Microsoft, Apple’s Mac systems for laptops/notebooks and desktops remain not commonly accepted by IT,” said David Mitchell Smith, vice president and Gartner Fellow, in a statement. “Going forward, Apple will continue to benefit from consumerization and will continue to evolve Macs to take on more iOS characteristics, which will contribute to acceptance of Macs in the enterprise. As such, enterprise acceptance of Apple will continue to be driven by consumer demand.”
Microsoft’s mobile offerings — Windows Phone and Windows 8 — are new, but will continue to achieve some acceptance from enterprises, largely due to the relationship that Microsoft has built with them and the management capabilities they provide. However, unlike Apple, Microsoft’s offerings have not benefited from consumerization, which is driven first by consumer demand, and then by the demand of those consumers to bring that technology into the workplace. As a result of this shifting landscape, Gartner believes that enterprises should plan for continued consumerization and for the fact that Apple will continue to be a significant beneficiary.
By 2013, the first $50 smartphone will appear in emerging countries.
New entrants in the smartphone market, including Chinese brands and white-box handset makers, have served to drive down the cost curve. Differing use cases between consumers in the emerging market and those in developed countries have enabled the reduction or elimination of certain costly features while advances in chipset integration have enabled semiconductor companies to address the growing low-cost smartphone market.
“The combination of competitive pricing pressure, open-channel market growth and feature elimination/integration will very soon result in the $50 smartphone. Semiconductor vendors that serve the mobile handset market must have a product strategy to address the low-cost smartphone platform, with $50 as a target in 2013,” said Mark Hung, research director at Gartner. “Global, brand-name smartphone vendors must re-examine their product lineups to determine how their low-end offerings are differentiated from the competitive products offered by low-cost vendors. Otherwise, brand-name smartphone vendors may want to cede this market to the white-box vendors and focus on high-end devices.”
More detailed analysis is available in the report “Predicts 2013: Mobility Becomes a Broad-Based Ingredient for Change” The report is available on Gartner’s website at http://www.gartner.com/resId=2242915.
Source: Gartner, Inc.
MacDailyNews Take: Have a nice day, rapidly dwindling number of IT Doofuses!
… Apple-haters will either convert or retire? Within a little more than a year? This is a Religious War, with many of them. Apple has long been the over-priced, under-performing (!) enemy … that they don’t understand. They get less money for more work than the Unix/Linux admins, yet refuse to switch.
No. Don’t think so. Some will, many will not.
This article is pure INSANITY ….
It’s already 2013. A desire for a $50 “smart”phone works only if you are attempting to sell them as “free” obamaphones in the US or are wishing the Apple profit margin is lowered even further. Non-smart phones already “sell” for less than $50 USD. So do Princess Phones(tm) (landline).
Sadly not going to happen. There are too many pieces of monitoring and administration software that still don’t work on Apple devices. Until all that backoffice stuff for managing a large environment starts to work with Macs etc. then enterprises will stay with Windows.
I know many here see IT staff as some kind of enemy, and having worked in IT departments for two decades and heard all the dumb comments against Macs I can see why, but their primary concern is to ensure that the business can run well and be protected in an emergency. For Macs to be fully welcomed they need to fit into the infrastructure as managed workstations. Unless you’ve already bought the right pieces of software, or have time to migrate to the right pieces of software, chances are they can’t be integrated easily.
Sadly, I agree. I have experience of 35+ years, too, in aerospace, local government, healthcare, finance. I’ve been a programmer / systems analyst from before color and lower case. I’ve been using a mac at home from before there were macs (Apple ][+). I would welcome Apple products wherever I worked. However, none of the core systems I used in the above mentioned industries were certified by the vendor to work on any Mac OS. In other words, if the military researchers, doctors, or bank tellers had a Mac at their station, they could not conduct day-to-day business. It is sad that the vendors have so little resources to program and certify Macs OS client applications. Those resources are all wrapped up and consumed by debugging and certifying buggy Windows variants. Wide acceptance by 2014? … only if Windows 8 and beyond continue their downward spiral … may Ballmer stay as long as it takes!
So many parents of youth who wanted to marry someone of another race spouted the warnings that the children from such a union would never be accepted. Those same parents claim that they are not bigoted but that the society is and those children born of mixed race will suffer.
Having stated that you worked in IT for two decades, you have defined yourself as an IT Doofas. Everything you have said points to the Luddite status you have obtained. You are precisely what is holding back Macs in the enterprise market. See any parallels? (Parallels will let you run Windows on a Mac you know)
I am an Apple doofus and proud of my Apple involvement for 35+ years. I’ve had many successes convincing folks to buy, support and purchase Apple products. I’ve said “get a Mac” countless times on support calls, but then I desire to dive in to fix their problem. I want to help the nurse, doctor, government staff person, bank teller, aircraft engineer as fast as possible because I don’t want the patient, taxpayer, bank customer, safety inspector to be kept waiting. I don’t make any enterprise purchasing decisions. I just try to help folks with the limited tools I have — sadly, I wish I had Apple tools at work (like I have at home), but such is the reality in this remote part of the world.
This ‘Gartner’ article is a lengthy, verbose, convoluted, diatribe of ‘CRAP’ designed to give some miniscule relevance to the ‘brain dead’ so called IT experts that prop up an ever increasingly failed enterprise such as Microsoft and others going forward. ‘Doofuses’ indeed!
I think IT is still going to largely recommend Apple for phones and tablets, Linux for web servers, and Windows for office computers. They might tolerate mixes of Macs and Windows in offices a bit more, but they will still insist that having only Windows desktops & laptops in corporate environments are cheaper and easier to manage.
The only thing I could imagine changing that would be if Apple released new cheaper Mac Pros and a new OS X with greater focus on office productivity and remote administrative tools designed to make life easier for technical support companies and workers in corporate environments. It could happen, but it would be big reversal for Apple to change its current focus on mobile devices.
Our enterprise environment has both Windows and Mac systems and the Mac’s are easier to administer from the HelpDesk office remotely. The Windows users take up much more time than do the Mac counterparts. We only wish is was as easy to admin the Windows users in our primarily Windows environment.
Personally, I agree with you, but I’m going by what people I know in tech support are saying (who seem to be closer to mainstream IT opinions than I am.)
I got out of tech support partially because of how not fun it is to fix problems on people’s Windows computers.
Semiconductor vendors that serve the mobile handset market must have a product strategy to address the low-cost smartphone platform, with $0.25 as a target in 2013.
See! Anyone can make up BS numbers and be an analyst. 😛
I think we *are* going to see a radical shift very rapidly. Take a look at Intel IT’s BYOD initiatives. That’s incredibly significant.
However, I do think we’ll still see some corporate environments where individuals get the cheapest “MS Office box” available and have little or no say in what works best for them.
Everybody keeps saying these kinds of things about Apple in enterprise. Apple as a company has no enterprise strategy – period. Get that through your think skulls. I really really wish they did – really. But it just ain’t gonna happen.