It’s no news that mobile apps are placing new demands on IT, reaching right into matters of basic architecture. And the challenge is only going to increase because people love being able to work anywhere, on any device.
“To keep your workforce loving your business applications as they go mobile, you will have to redesign the fundamental architecture for delivering apps,” says Ted Schadler in discussing a new Forrester report on mobile apps. “The architecture of client-server (and browser-server) is inadequate. You will need to build from an architecture of devices and services. The mobile app Internet is that architecture: local apps (including HTML5 browsers) on smart mobile devices and cloud-hosted interactions and data.”
Mobile apps are changing the user expectations due to their operational simplicity, essentially ending the lock between client and server. “It’s now an architecture of devices to services,” he says. “All of a sudden, you will need an interaction layer to separate the data and transaction layers.”
One beneficiary of the new mobile architecture is the cloud, which gains importance on the mobile app Internet. “When your goal is to deliver a great mobile app experience, it’s best if mobile devices and their local apps can get directly to the interaction logic and data they need,” Schadler contends. “Tunneling through firewalls and maintaining complex interactions on an application server hosted in the data center will be very hard to get right.”
Click here to read more of Schadler’s observations on the Forrester report.