harnessing the power of the mobile cloud

Antenna Software, Inc., 111 Town Square Place, Jersey City, New Jersey 07310

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Published November 2010 Antenna Software, Inc.111 Town Square PlaceJersey City, New Jersey 07310

Copyright© 2010 by Antenna Software, Inc. All right reserved.All products and product names mentioned in this publication are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Harnessing the Power of the Mobile Cloud

WHITE PAPER



TAble of coNTeNTS

Introduction

The Mobile cloud

Time to Market

ease of Deployment

Reliability

Scalability

Support

cost of ownership

The Antenna Mobile cloud

conclusion

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introductionMobile technology has been around for decades, but only within the past couple of years has mobility become truly pervasive. Whether for work or play, mobile devices are fast becoming the dominant means by which we interact with information, applications and people.

Cloud computing has also been around for decades—the concept of sharing comput-ing resources can be traced back to the days of mainframes. Adoption of cloud technology, too, has surged to unprecedented levels over the past few years as Internet technologies continue to mature and get more powerful.

In fact, the research firm Gartner has identified both cloud computing and mobile applications as the top two strategic technologies for 2011--defined as technologies with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Both technology trends are driven primarily by the consumer’s unquenchable thirst for real-time connectivity to information and with each other. But, both trends also have important impacts on the long-term strategy of corporate IT. This whitepaper discusses the convergence of mobility and cloud computing and discusses six strategic advan-tages by harnessing the power of the Mobile Cloud for driving competitive differentia-tion and delivering happiness to employees and customers.

the Mobile cloudBefore we dive in, you might be asking, “What is a Mobile Cloud?” A Mobile cloud is a set of hosted services, typically powered by a mobile enterprise application platform (MeAP), that shields the complexities of mobility from the enterprise and enables them to focus instead on quickly and easily delivering transformational mobile apps to customers, employees and partners.

What’s so complex about mobility? Well, getting data from a backend system to a mobile device may sound easy, but it’s a lot trickier than you think. There’s the matter of extricating the data from a heterogeneous backend environment, communicating seamlessly across potentially more than 400 wireless networks across the globe, and finally presenting data to thousands of mobile device types – with different form factors. And don’t forget about guaranteeing transactions in an occasionally connected environment, dealing with multiple potential security points-of-failure, optimizing performance and responsiveness, managing network latency, and many more complex but necessary capabilities of an enterprise-grade mobile deployment. The Mobile Cloud aims to unburden corporate IT with all these intricacies and leave them with the more strategic objective of building mobile apps that transform the business.

Additionally, cloud computing spreads the cost of infrastructure and support resources among customers that use it, and the Mobile Cloud is no different. By offloading the

“By 2015, more than 240 million business customers will be leverag-ing cloud computing services through mobile devices, driving revenues of $5.2 billion”

— ABI Research

“We are seeing an acceleration of adoption of cloud computing and cloud services among enterprises …IT managers are thinking strategi-cally about cloud service deploy-ments; more-progressive enterpris-es are thinking through what their IT operations will look like in a world of increasing cloud service leverage.”

— Ben Pring, research vice president at Gartner, “Forecast:

Public Cloud Services, Worldwide and Regions, Industry Sectors,

2009-2014”



burden of building and administering a comprehensive, end-to-end mobile infrastruc-ture, enterprises can realize faster time-to-market and greater return on investment for their apps by simply plugging into the Mobile Cloud.

When you add it all up, there are six significant advantages for choosing the Mobile Cloud as the foundation for a comprehensive and long-term enterprise mobility strategy:

Time to market – ability to quickly build and deploy mobile apps to adapt to 1. ever-changing device technology and user needsEase of deployment – ability to easily publish and distribute mobile apps with 2. greater flexibility and tighter controlReliability – ability to run mobile apps with minimal service disruption for all users3. Scalability – ability to extend mobile apps to millions of users and transactions 4. across the globeSupport – ability to rely on systems and people to optimize operations and mobile 5. app usageCost of ownership – ability to reduce burden on internal IT resources and shift 6. them to more strategic objectives

tiMe to MarketSpeed is crucial in this new era of mobility. Device manufacturers are churning out new and more powerful devices faster and faster. This is great for the end users, but for enterprises and developers, the fragmentation becomes a nightmare to manage. The days of writing an app for one or two devices and expecting it to last for three to five years are gone. The shelf life of mobile apps these days is getting shorter and shorter.

The mobile world is moving towards smartphones, and there are no less than five major mobile operating systems that developers must address in their apps: Android, BlackBerry, iOS, Windows Mobile/Windows Phone, and Symbian. Each one of these platforms also has its own versions and form factors (e.g., smartphone vs. tablets) that developers must contend with; and new OS’s and devices are coming out faster than ever. Furthermore, developers not only have to worry about the various native device operating systems, but different types of device-side technologies such as HTML5, mobile Web, and SMS-based apps. With a Mobile Cloud, enterprises and developers are free to leverage whichever device and client-types that are most suitable for their target app and end-user requirements. Developers can use a mobile IDE that is a service of the Mobile Cloud to make app development easier and faster, especially across device platforms. Developers may also publish apps built on native device IDEs—such as Apple Xcode or Visual Studio .NET—through the use of API’s to the Mobile Cloud. This development flexibility ensures that the time to market for apps is minimized, and these apps built on the Mobile Cloud are future-proofed as the device landscape continues to evolve.



Figure 1: Time to market of Mobile Cloud vs. Internal Build

ease of deployMentThe app store model has changed how we, as end-users, expect to get our apps. As consumers, we are free to seek out and download apps that we want. As business users, we are coming to expect this same empowerment. We no longer want to passively accept the apps that we get with our devices. If we can easily download an app to manage our household expenses, why can’t we just as easily download an expense reporting app for work?

A critical function of the Mobile Cloud is to enable ease of app deployment, not just for consumers, but for business users as well. This means that enterprises should be able to easily publish role-based apps through their own channels (i.e., private enterprise app stores) to their customers, employees and partners—bypassing the need to distribute apps through device manufacturer or carrier app stores, if they choose. This distribution model is key to democratizing mobility for the workforce and to ensuring proper brand control throughout the mobile app lifecycle with consumers.



Figure 2: Mobile app deployment and publishing via the Antenna Mobile Cloud

reliabilityMobility is all about getting data from point A to point B, but the main challenge lies in the nebulous middle area. The two end points are known (e.g., a backend host system and a smartphone device), but the in-between contains many unknowns—such as speed of connections, bandwidth, communications protocols, availability of networks, load balancing, and redundancy. In the wired world of telecommunications, operators strive for “the five nines” or 99.999% reliability, which is about half an hour of downtime in total per year! Mobility may not achieve that level of reliability yet, but the Mobile Cloud makes it easier to ensure maximum uptime.

The Mobile Cloud makes mobile apps more reliable because all the idiosyncrasies of mobility are seamlessly processed and managed within a unified technology stack—rather than passing through an array of systems and data centers. Some may refer to it as mobile middleware, but it’s much more than just integration between the host systems and devices. The Mobile Cloud’s technology architecture also encompasses data compression for faster performance and better battery life, network sensing and optimization for superior usability regardless of coverage, guaranteed messaging and data integrity in an unpredictable wireless world, security and management for tighter control, and transactional reliability for optimal operations. The result is that enterprises can simply plug into the Mobile Cloud to ensure that their apps have the greatest reliability and availability.

scalabilityThe mobile user population is vast, and continues to grow at a rapid pace. More and more workers are finding the need for smartphones and tablets in their day-to-day work whether inside or outside the office. Consumers are increasingly making mobile

The Antenna Mobile Cloud has achieved 99.95% availability of our systems, or better, since 2006.

2006 uptime – 99.95%•2007 uptime – 100%•2008 uptime – 100%•2009 uptime – 99.96% •

“After reaching around 4.6 billion mobile cellular subscriptions by the end of 2009, ITU expects the number of mobile cellular subscrip-tions globally to reach five billion in 2010.”

— International Telecommunication Union, February 15, 2010



devices their preferred choice for quick and easy access to their apps and the Web, rather than through a desktop. What this entails for any enterprise contemplating a mobile strategy, is that they have to think big.

Don’t think about deploying mobile apps to just a couple of hundred of employees or to a few thousand customers. Think about what it means and what it would take to scale the mobile deployment to the entire company and to the entire customer base. A shiver may run through the spine of the CIO just thinking of all the capital investments and personnel required to support such a deployment.

The Mobile Cloud is essential to address scalability. Enterprises can leverage it to smoothly expand their mobile app roll-outs, while also enabling them to deal with unexpected spikes in usage. What this means is that companies can easily add, or even subtract, users from the deployment without having to worry about the ramifica-tions on the internal IT environment and resources. Moreover, the Mobile Cloud is built with overhead to accommodate spikes in transaction volumes and mobile app activity, so that any surge in the popularity or usage of an app can be handled without disrup-tions to service.

supportThe Mobile Cloud is not just about technology; it is also about the people supporting it. The main challenge for many organizations trying to build a mobile infrastructure is that it takes time and experience—a luxury that cannot be afforded in today’s ultra-competi-tive markets. The Mobile Cloud offers instant access to people with the know-how and skills to not only implement the mobile strategy, but also to support the deployment operationally to make sure the company and its users reap the maximum benefits.

The work doesn’t stop once an app is deployed or downloaded. One of the main reasons for the failure of many mobile app deployments is lack of ongoing manage-ment, support and feedback—particularly for employee-facing apps. It is rare that you ship an app and expect users to instantly fall in love with it. Inevitably there will need to be tweaks and updates to the apps—maybe just for specific user groups. The Mobile Cloud offers support services that can help identify and quickly get these incremental updates out to the field and have them be made transparently to the user is critical to successful app adoption and usage.

Additionally, the beauty of mobile apps is that it offers so much rich data into the behavior of the user. The Mobile Cloud can capture all this data—from screen views to login activity—and enable analysis of it to further improve upon the app. This capability is especially valuable for consumer apps since analytics from the Mobile Cloud can provide instantaneous and detailed glimpses of what your customers are interested in.

The worldwide mobile worker population is set to increase to 1.19 billion in 2013, accounting for 34.9% of the worldwide workforce

— IDC “Worldwide Mobile Worker Population 2009 – 2013 Forecast”

Currently, the Antenna Mobile Cloud processes more than 35 million transactions per month from mobile users. The Antenna Mobile Cloud has built-in capacity to accommodate a doubling of typical transaction volumes for the trailing 12 months.



cost of ownershipThe Mobile Cloud refers to a multi-tenant infrastructure where the hardware and software systems for mobility reside outside the enterprise and are shared among many customers. Companies can share resources and applications without a high level of capital expenditure or impact to their own hardware and software resources. This multitenant approach reduces the costs of the Mobile Cloud to each customer and at the same time it enables them to take advantage of new innovations driven by all customers and applied to the Mobile Cloud. The result is not only a lower total cost of ownership, but a greater benefit from joint innovation.

When evaluating a Mobile Cloud (and cloud computing in general), companies naturally want to compare TCO against an internally deployed project. However, such compari-sons are often not “apples-to-apples”. By going with a cloud-based vendor, companies get price transparency and they can predict what their costs will be. Companies are provided with the pricing structure and typically have set contracts that define the pricing parameters and the project deliverables. In comparison, internal projects may start with a set budget, but it may get out of scope quickly and there is no single vendor to hold accountable.

the antenna Mobile cloudFor customers that choose the Antenna Mobile Cloud, they are choosing a solution that has a long, successful heritage. The Antenna Mobile Cloud has a proven track record of ROI for its Global 1,000 customer base.

Figure 3: The Antenna Mobile Cloud



The Mobile Cloud is not simply a solution where the mobile app servers are hosted in a third-party data center for the customer, which many mobile software vendors can easily do. The Antenna Mobile Cloud is run as a carrier-grade Network Operations Cen-ter (NOC) with a multi-tenant architecture, full redundancy, and end-to-end enablement and support services to make consuming our cloud services as easy as possible.

The AMP Gateway, which is the heart and brains of the Antenna Mobility Platform, manages transactions from the backend host systems to the wireless devices, without the need to store or replicate host data in the cloud. The customer’s mobile project teams (developers, administrators, managers, etc.) have secure, role-based access to a Web management dashboard—the AMP Management Center—and to the Eclipse-based development environment—AMP Studio. By leveraging the Antenna Mobile Cloud, customers also gain a unique advantage because it provides complete visibility into every detail of a customer’s mobile deployment status. As a result, Antenna can provide unparalleled 24x7 customer support that can proactively monitor, troubleshoot, and mitigate network issues to minimize system downtime.

conclusionThe Mobile Cloud is a relatively new phenomenon, but one that is important because it is the intersection of two pervading technology trends: mobility and cloud computing. The Mobile Cloud can be used to transform your entire business by driving real-time, frictionless operations, impacting not just internal employees, but also external partners and your end customers. It offers the quickest route to deploying game-changing mobile apps, while ensuring that the solutions built are not made obsolete by the fast changing mobile technology market.

The Mobile Cloud is different from other cloud services, because a Mobile Cloud needs to address all the intricate nuances of mobility (such as a diversity of devices and wireless networks) while providing a truly shared infrastructure. By harnessing the power of the Mobile Cloud, you can gain key competitive and business advantages in deploying mobile apps, while ensuring a solid foundation for your long-term mobile strategy.

Get ready to deploy happinessAre you ready to take your mobility strategy to the next level? To learn more about the Antenna Mobile Cloud, AMP or other Antenna products and services:

Visit www.antennasoftware.com

Call (888) 723 2832

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“95 percent of respondents were satisfied with Antenna as their hosted mobile solutions provider, and 97 percent would recommend Antenna to a colleague.”

— Antenna 2009 Customer Service Satisfaction Survey

“Our resources are doing develop-ment on the cloud at Antenna. That gave us the ability to jump start everything. We knew this was the right strategy to transform to a real-time, event driven value chain.”

— Kevin Flowers, Director of Enabling Technologies, CCE

harnessing the power of the mobile cloud

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