Great mobile applications come from a great mobile development platform

Users increasingly expect more and more from their mobile applications.
Where mobile apps once simply supplemented a larger application with useful-but-limited functionality, they now — in many cases — have become the key interface that drives sales or user adoption of a service because they offer an “any time, any place” experience.
Increased functionality has led to increased complexity. Today’s mobile apps must interface with multiple data sources. They need to be secure. They must be responsive, and they have to evolve quickly to meet the changing demands of people that use them.
Mobile apps must also deliver analytics, which help with future development of both the application and the services it delivers.
To meet these challenges and others, a feature-rich development environment is required. A good development environment, in which complex applications are easier to create and maintain, will lead to faster-to-market applications and better developer and user experiences.
The IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation, available through IBM Bluemix, has recently been named a leader in “The Forrester Wave: Mobile Development Platforms, Q4 2016,” Forrester Research Inc., 24 October 2016.
Forrester “evaluated vendors against 32 criteria, which we grouped into three high-level buckets”: current offering, strategy and market presence. Each of the criteria assessed is important to application development and delivery professionals. Strengths and weaknesses in those criteria can determine the suitability of a particular tool.
Because the IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation is delivered on IBM Bluemix, developers have a rich, cloud-enabled environment at their fingertips, which is recognized in the Forrester report. Data access and delivery from multiple sources is an important aspect of modern, mobile systems of engagement.
Underpinned by IBM Bluemix, IBM MobileFirst provides a strong API ecosystem, giving developers secure access to systems of record through integration services, along with powerful analytics and DevOps capabilities. This further enriches and accelerates the development experience, enabling a two-speed IT model in which born-on-the-cloud mobile systems of engagement can rapidly evolve and change according to consumer and market need, while traditional, on-premises systems of record can remain on their typically slower change cycle.
Like many other professionals, developers like to work with tools that make their jobs easier: tools that are feature-rich, yet simple; that enable building common and complex functionality, such as interfaces and analytics at the click of a mouse; that help them get on with the important job of coding, and that make their apps stand out from the rest. To develop the best mobile applications, developers need a versatile, intuitive mobile development platform.
Download a copy of “The Forrester Wave: Mobile Development Platforms, Q4 2016” here and find out why Forrester says the IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation is a leader in its evaluation.
The post Great mobile applications come from a great mobile development platform appeared first on #Cloud computing news.
Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud