Tag Archives: mobile

Oracle & Xamarin Hookup

26 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by in General, Oracle, Technology

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When I first heard about the Oracle & Xamarin tie up to support Oracle’s Mobile Cloud Service  – MCS(to use one of those xaaS acronyms we’re talking MBaaS – Mobile Backend aaS) I was little surprised and puzzled as for any Java/Javascript developer Oracle already their Mobile Application Framework which includes Apache Cordova and some Xamarin style cross compiling for native capabilities for Java.

It’s when you look at information such as that provided by DeveloperEconomics.com some sense becomes apparent. Oracle aren’t so much as abandoning MAF as trying to create conditions where all roads lead to MCS as the 2 most popular cross platform/x-compile mobile frameworks which represent 75% or more of the framework usage.  It is also likely (but I speculate here) that providing an Xamarin API and SDK probably isn’t that significant an investment given all of it has been built to support MAF already.

As late comers to the cloud service market, his sort of approach stands to increase Oracle’s potential to gain market share. The fact that they have got Xamarin onboard and the commitment (regardless of how easy it may have been to leverage existing work) Oracle’s decision to seek global domination in PaaS and SaaS markets. For this to pay off though Oracle need to shed the image of its only for the big boys with deep pockets.

Some helpful other resource:

Thinking about a COTs Mobile Strategy

28 Tuesday Oct 2014

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More and more software capability is becoming commoditised and off the shelf either in the form of COTS packages or SaaS solutions new considerations and challenges arrive for customer businesses.

Recently we had an initial conversation at the architectural level with a vendor who have a well thought out end to end offering which includes mobile apps for our customers (white label offering). This is great in many respects as we can depend on our vendor to deal with the challenges of keeping mobile apps upto date and contend with the ever changing mobile landscape.

If a business you don’t fit into classic solution stacks for example Boots (now part of Walgreens) isn’t just a retailer but also a prescription pharmacist you’re likely to be sourcing solutions from different suppliers. The challenge comes from the fact you’re likely want to leverage different white label apps for different offerings e.g. prescriptions, eye test related etc (which are potentially going to come from different vendors, particularly if you want to adopt a best of breed set of solutions). It is however important that you get a consistency in look and feel, and unified authentication to the different apps is essential when presenting solutions to end customers. The worst thing in the world would be have different authentications which means the customer has to remember multiple passwords to engage with your business.

The look and feel can be to an extend dealt with by the fact a lot of contemporary mobile applications are built on a hybrid framework so you can use CSS3 to drive standardisation or atleast colour and branding; which plays to a white label strategy.

As to authentication that could be more challenging, you need consistency in approach between all of the applications, there are standards out there such as OpenId but you the different apps to offer the same authentication sources. Even OpenId has issues, and the support for the latest version of the standard looks somewhat mixed. But in addition to that there is the fact there is a degree of fragmentation for example Facebook used to support OpenId but now has Facebook Connect.

So if you wanted to offer a voucher system from your POS (Point of Sale) provider and perhaps an app for an ordering capability built around your ERP from a different vendor what are the chances of having consistency?

If you know all your vendors and launching your mobile solutions you can look for common denominators and drive in that direction. But this is a rare situation. All of this is ideally linked to your normal website as well which may well be linked to a different solution such as Oracle’s OID.

If the apps offer their own LDAP authentication service then you have the possibility of synchronising these repositories so if the user interacts with one app then the details can be pushed to the other apps’ repository through your own integration layer.

In a perfect world your white label apps will have the means to configure to connect to a single LDAP server, in this case you can get things aligned at-least for authentication.

Without this then there is going to be a pretty challenging situation, to the point the ROI on consistent user experience needs to be seriously examined ad it maybe time to think about building the solutions yourself.

Impact of App Maintenance on brand

26 Friday Sep 2014

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I have recently been working on some guidance on when to use mobile or web applications for my employer. What has been interesting is that there is plenty of information on the technical dimensions that should be considered. But not so much on the negative brand impact that could occur if the application isn’t targeted at users properly, and most crucially sustained.

Let me show what I mean by highlighting some common, but relevant observations.

Many end user businesses tend to work on a project or programme basis, so once a solution whether internal, B2B or B2C once delivered gets handed over to the operational teams to monitor and keep alive. Even for devops once the solution is deemed complete the bulk of the team will move to new objectives. Net result is that the solution remains static until new functional requirements are needed.

As businesses, we would like to increase the ability for customers to serve themselves and ‘shape their customer journey’ to what they want. All of which means we will increasingly see 1st point of customer engagement either as new or returning customers through apps in the same way as websites have prior to the rise in mobility.

We know that mobile devices are evolving at a tremendous rate driven by vendor competition. This has resulted in things like ever changing screen sizes and resolutions which have largely been growing but with Apple jumping into the watch market I think we’ll see another change in the next couple of years.

Not only have the screen resolutions changed, the interaction and presentation styles have been evolving. Take the huge change for IOS7 with the adoption of the ‘flat’ design paradigm, and with IOS8 subtler but important changes to allow changing of the feel of aspects like the keypad. This all before you think about the change and evolution of other solutions that you might want to integrate with such as Facebook, Twitter etc.

So, back to my original point, what does this mean? Well essentially if you’re going to invest in mobile apps you have to keep up the investment with regular updates to keep the experience current, you can’t really use the project model. With stats like Gartner’s around security (75% of apps not passing security tests by 2015) there is a clear need also to invest in capability to drive quality into the solution in all the less visible non functional issues and examining the solution continually from the user view point. This all adds upto a mobile application not being cheap.

Just to bring my point home, below are some screen shots from the Apple App Store taken very recently which reflect what happens and the impact you could end up with (and the feedback in a form that you’re unlikely to address). Not to mention Virgin is a pretty brand aware organisation, so we’d have thought they wouldn’t have got caught out by these challenges.

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