The case for the mobile enterprise application store

By Philippe Winthrop and David Goldschlag
Apple raised the bar for other smartphone vendors by transforming the smartphone from an email device to an application platform. The marriage of its elegantly designed smartphone with a well-stocked online application store has forced other vendors to respond in kind--Google with the Android Market, RIM with Blackberry's App World, Microsoft with the Window's Mobile Marketplace and Palm with the webOS Application Catalog. Why are these app stores so popular and what is driving application deployments today?  

First let's review the business drivers for the enterprise. Today the enterprise requires a method to deploy applications to smartphones, just like they deploy applications to laptops and desktops. This is important because mobile applications make the smartphone more valuable as a business tool by connecting it to other enterprise applications and services. Examples of applications and services that may be deployed via an app store include collaboration software such as email and instant messaging (IM), line-of-business applications like CRM, SFA and FSA, personal productivity applications like document editing and expense tracking, and security applications such as VPN, anti-virus and soft tokens.

Initially Apple, with its App Store for iPhone, set the standard for smartphone application distribution, but many consider this to be only a consumer phenomenon. Despite the fact that consumers are taking their smartphone to work, the Apple App Store along with other vendor app stores haven't satisfied the needs of the enterprise well. For example, enterprises need to:

• Deploy custom applications,
• negotiate license pricing with their ISVs and manage license use,
• control the policies related to which applications may be deployed to which user's smartphone, and
• configure the applications to interact seamlessly with the enterprises back-end services.

To efficiently deploy enterprise applications to smartphones, the enterprise requires an Enterprise Application Store that is manageable by the enterprise IT organization, is used to deploy applications according to enterprise policies and configures those applications so they integrate effectively with other enterprise services. Once a smartphone is enterprise-activated, the necessary enterprise applications should be automatically deployed and maintained throughout the smartphone's lifecycle.

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