Enterprise Mobile Technology - A Changing Marketplace

Last week, RSG released a major update to our Enterprise Mobile Technology platform evaluations.  The changes reflect a fast-evolving marketplace. Here are some key themes.

Evolving Tiers

As the mobile experience management marketplace has expanded, it's beginning to resemble most other advanced enterprise technology marketplaces in its 3-tier structure:

  • Infrastructure Vendors: Large IT vendors that have mobile offerings. We review IBM, SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, and Adobe in this category.

  • Mobility Specialists: These are vendors who focus on provide mobility solutions. We evaluate Antenna, Kony, Appcelerator, appMobi, FeedHenry, RhoMobile, Xamarin, and Verivo here.
     
  • Niche Offerings: These are highly specialized application environments or supplementary layers. We evaluate Corona Labs, July Systems, Kinvey, Service2Media, and Spring Mobile in this caregory

Customers who have already made broad investments in infrastructure from larger vendors always face the dilemma of whether to use mobile capabilities from those incumbent platforms, or to go with specialized mobility vendors. Our research helps clarify your choices.

Evolving Capabilities

The lines are increasingly blurring among Mobile Experience Management platforms, Mobile Application Management (MAM), and Mobile Device Management (MDM) tools. These still remain somewhat separate problem domains. But some vendors are beginning to promote (nominally) integrated offerings -- in particular incorporating MAM into other business services.

In our evaluation research, we've added a new parameter called "Application and Device Management," where we specifically call out these services on a vendor-by-vendor basis.

Emerging Players

In any newish marketplace, vendors rise and fall quickly. Three key players have arisen in the past few quarters: Salesforce, Xamarin, and Kinvey. We now cover each of them.

You can download a sample here or subscribe here.

Other Enterprise Mobile Technology posts

Axway Acquires Appcelerator

The Enterprise Mobile Technology Marketplace is evolving rapidly and a number of specialized mobile technology vendors have now been acquired by vendors with a broader set of offerings.

Self-appraisal of our 2015 predictions

Okay, so how did we do? I total it up to 7 out of 10 (Yes - 6 times, No - 2, Partial - 2). That’s not as good as last year but not bad either