Like we said earlier this week mobile enterprise space is heating up. This week alone saw the launch of three new tools for building mobile enterprise apps. Forrester has given some advice to enterprises for how to get started in mobile enterprise development, which the firm suggests needs to move into the mainstream of enterprise development. Here’s a brief guide to some of the new tools enterprises have at their disposal for mobilizing their work force.
Update: See also 3 More Ways to Mobilize Enterprise Applications
MobileIron
MobileIron announced the release of its Virtual Smartphone Platform 3.0, including an API for mobile application developers to use MobileIron’s device management platform to build their own mobile enterprise applications.
In addition to allowing enterprises to add-on functionality to MobileIron servers, developers will now be able to:
- Trigger MobileIron device management actions from other enterprise systems
- Build mobile security services based on MobileIron’s rich set of device, behavior, and app compliance data
- Create new analytical tools for understanding the real-time activity and service quality experience of end-users
Of particularly note is the ability to access geolocation data through MobileIron.
LeapFactor
On Wednesday stealth startup Leapfactor launched its new cloud-based mobile enterprise application platform. LeapFactor helps enterprises build single purpose apps that connect with existing enterprise software platforms as simply as possible. For example, enterprise developers could build an “expense approval” app that interfaces with the company’s SAP or Oracle ERP system.
In fact, SAP is one of Leapfactor’s customers Leapfactor built for SAP an iPhone app called SAP EcoHub that provides access to and interaction withSAP’s web-based EcoHub Solution Marketplace
Couch One Mobile
Couch One Mobile is the new mobile app development platform from CouchDB corporate sponsor Couch One (formerly known as Couchio). We covered its launch on Wednesday. According to Couch One:
CouchOne Mobile is the top choice for native data store on any wireless device because it’s lightweight and saves battery life by keeping data offline. With CouchOne Mobile, developers can easily write web applications one time, scale vertically and share data and applications across the computing platforms and mobile devices they choose.
Based on CouchDB, CouchOne Mobile is way more than a database. It’s a full-stack web app deployment environment with a database, a JavaScript interpreter (middleware layer) and a mini web server (web tier) all in one convenient carrying case.
DragonRad
DragonRad from Seregon is a cross-platform enterprise-focused mobile application development platform launching at BlackBerry DevCon 2010 this month.
DragonRad provides a drag and drop environment for app creation, so developers need not learn the native programming language of each platform they want to build native apps for.
Rhomobile
Rhomobile, a Ruby-based cross-platform enterprise application development platform, is less new (version 2.0 was released in June), but it’s definitely worth a mention. RhoMobile’s metadata schema makes it easier to create mobile apps that work with enterprise applications with custom databases.
