Applications2Apps and Enterprise Ecosystems

Article first published as Applications2Apps and Enterprise Ecosystems on Technorati.

Twenty years ago I remember standing in long queues at 5:30AM in the morning, with an application form in hand at the railway station waiting for the mainframe to churn out ticket availability. The Indian Railways is the fourth largest in the world and transports 30 million passengers every day. The system changed the way ticketing was done from manual registers to centralized ticketing. So I could choose the train service across different lines and not be restricted to services offered by one booking station. There were two major breakthroughs the ticketing system achieved; it aggregated localized service and automated enterprise processes.

Internet Self Service Channels

As the internet delivery channels matured, automation moved from enterprise processes to client processes and I no longer had to fill paper forms or stand in queues, I could login to a self service portal and get the job done. So CRIS (Center for Railway Information Systems) maintained a powerful ticketing backbone capable of processing millions of transactions and started building out services which was directly exposed to end customers.

Agile Platforms

This is a journey most enterprises have had to go through. In the last few years enterprises have started investing heavily into analytics to understand consumer behavior. The data gathered is used to structure products and services alike and this in turn resulted in the need for agile technology platforms as consumer behavior did not operate in a set path. A dynamic business environment where life runs on quarterly cycles cannot afford anyone the luxury of working on a set annual plan. Therefore IT is forced to transform their platforms to become nimble, responsive to change and support a quarterly release cycles.

Enterprise Ecosystems

With the introduction of tablets, smart phones and cloud computing Google and Apple have stopped building packaged applications and instead provide a massive ecosystem. They provide an ecosystem that empowers the world to build their own apps and in doing so they have changed the game. Rapid strides made in the world of telecommunication and technology has made consumer appetite and possibilities endless. So why bind the consumers to the boundaries of one enterprise’s vision? We have unwittingly stepped into the age of Enterprise Ecosystems.

The second transformation is applications are decomposed into small light weight apps enabling Micro Services and Multichannel Services offering. So in the dark ages of the mainframe computers you had monolithic applications running on massive servers the size of an average cafeteria. In the 90s you had to install a large desktop application from a CD-ROM. Today you download and install apps the size of a floppy disk. If the only banking service you use is the ATM, just download the ATM locator app versus logging into a website and navigating 10 different menus. Further I want to be looking for a coffee shop and then find an ATM via the same maps application. So the services are focused, multi-channel and mapped to a specific need that needs instant gratification.

Virtusa an IT services company recently organized an event called the Hackathon, where developers were encouraged to build their most innovative mobile applications in 8hrs. Some of the apps that the developers came out in a day were mind blowing. Such was the resounding success, they further extended the concept to come up with their own internal innovation ecosystem, where developers in their free time can come up with their own apps. The expectation is that as the beta apps mature they will build micro service offerings for their clients based on employee innovation. In doing so they have recognized the power of mass innovation and empowered their employees with what might be the beginnings of a larger Enterprise Ecosystem.

Today’s employees are forced to live two lives on the one hand they use a powerful set of tools to communicate, share and solve complex problems in their personal lives, they walk into work only to be locked into ageing systems and inflexible processes. In my recent article Crowd in the Cloud, I wrote about how the consumers are taking control and collaborating amongst themselves to solve their problems, while enterprises are playing catch up. Innovation has always been random and decentralized and very difficult to tap into in a large enterprises. With the power of technology, enterprises need to create the necessary Ecosystems, empower their employees to create their own Micro Services, and keep pace with the frantic pace of technology change.

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Keeping Tabs

I practically live in my computer, but sort of ties you down at home or you got to lug around the laptop all over town. Reading an ebook with the laptop on my chest can get pretty hot and heavy for all the wrong reasons and I almost need to redecorate my living room to hook it up with my sound system. So in 2009 I bought an HP Tablet PC in the hope that I could finally read my ebooks with a swipe, twist it around and voila, I got myself my good ol’laptop again. As I used it believe me wasn’t easy reading on travel with a backlit display and the weight felt like carrying a Greek marble tablet. So I went and got myself one of those nifty ebook readers the slimmest lightest gadget out there called the Jet ebook reader. Loaded up my ebooks and started reading, great under sunlight easy to carry around. All was good until I tried reading some of the illustrated magazines, ebook readers takes publication back to Windows 3.11 days with their monochrome displays. So out went the ebook reader. I had almost given up looking for the all in one device until Apple launched the iPad. With its slick design, light, touch screen display, 3G support, it was god sent. So like every judicious electronics shopper I started reading the reviews and watched product demos online as I went through the glittery specs my eyes finally landed on the fine print, NO MULTI-TASKING. It felt like a kid being told Santa wasn’t real. I am still amazed how the 25 million iPad owners feel when they have to turn off their music to check the incoming email, it made the device seem practically useless. I quickly realized the iPad was a tablet prototype and the real deal is yet to come.

March 2011 was the much awaited iPad 2 launch, which turned out to be a big disappointed. They did fix the multi-tasking bug, but with the poor front facing camera and Apple’s frustrating stance on flash and micro SD support left a lot to be desired. At the same time there were a host of competing products being launched, right from the RIM’s Playbook to the so called iPad killers in Honeycomb tablets. So let’s flip it around, why not look at what I want my tablet to do and not do.

Phone vs Tablet

Samsung created this unwanted confusion by rushing into the launch of Galaxy Tab before Android launched their tablet OS and in doing so created an accidental hit. The smaller foot print made it compact and easy to carry around and made quite a few Android apps targeted for the phone work. Further you could even make phone calls from the tablet, does it make a tablet also your phone? Some of those carrying it looked pretty ridiculous answering calls on it to be honest. I would certainly look at it as a means to video conference but not to replace a phone. So let’s safely leave this feature out of the criteria list.

Reading a book

An average paperback book measures around 216X135 and weighs 373gms, so if you are looking for a tablet to read a book I would imagine you would also look for a similar form factor. The 10 inch tablets clearly don’t fall into the paperback category both in weight and size. The closest contenders in this regards would be Samsung 8.9, RIM Playbook, Sony and HTC Flyer which is also the lightest.

None of the tablets have a viable solution to daylight displays and Super AMOLED has remained just a super rumor in 2011. Given this is the case I would go for the best displays, both Samsung tablets and to be launched Sony score highest with their 1280x800 displays but iPad 2 remains the best display unit out there.

Document publishing

Sending email, making presentations and editing spreadsheets and documents would primarily be the list of tasks I would like to do on the tablet. Today onscreen QWERTY keyboards try hard to replace physical keyboards with vibration or audio feedback, but that remains a distant dream. Can’t beat the physical keyboards when it comes to typing speed, so serious work does take me back to my laptop. A viable solution to this challenge could be a Bluetooth keyboard; some of them even come with a very slick leather stand that can be propped up like a laptop.

Camera

Will I run around taking pictures with a tablet, seems Ok to do it with a phone as it’s almost the same foot print as the point and shoot cameras. But holding up a 10 inch tablet to take a picture can be quite cumbersome to say the least.

If you are one who scans a lot of bills or documents, having a camera handy in your tablet can be great way to do it provided the rear camera is good. The Samsung 10.1 seems to have gone all the way with an 8MP camera; none of the other tablets come anywhere close to that.

Tablet is a great medium for video conferencing on the go, but most of the tablets have a really low resolution front facing camera. RIM’s playbook has the best 3MP front facing camera along with Adam (since its camera rotates both ways), while strangely most others are 2MP or lower.

Internet

Browsing the internet on most tablets is a breeze with their powerful dual core processors and 1GB memory is what most laptops ran 2 years ago. Adding to that is the great usability with the touch screen, pinch zoom and swipes make the entire interaction so direct and interactive. I think tablets were designed for the internet and beat the PC experience hands down. Having said that if you are wondering why your favorite news site looks so different on an iPad, its simple, they don’t support flash and probably never will. Why would you build an amazing tablet and not include Flash support, Apple fears losing revenue from its Appstore to flash based web developers so until it makes business sense better luck iPad fans. So the iPad is a great tablet otherwise, but the anti-flash support definitely remains a blemish.

Video watching on a 10 inch tablet is definitely better than the smaller ones and the quality of display matters, the Galaxy tablet and iPad are definitely top of the heap. While Xoom has a higher resolution display somehow it does not convert to a great display.

So are tablets PCs?

That’s my dream; clunky laptops belong in the museum, tablets are like the dog in the Vodafone ad tagging along wherever you go. But it’s too early for a tab to replace PCs, tablet applications will have to mature like desktop applications have and will certainly not be a replacement for heavy duty PC app users. So tablets for now will remain an evolving platform and will find its place as a powerful business and personal solution with every platform leaving you wanting just a little bit more.

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