IBM has apparently announced that it will be investing 100 million dollars in a research program into mobile enterprise applications. The 5 year programme would focus on mobile workforce management and financial transactions.
According to the Indian Express, IBM made the announcement today that is looking at better ways to use mobile device to conduct daily business operations. IBM will be researching three particular areas of mobile enterprise:
- enabling mobile enterprise
- mobility in emerging markets
- end-user experience
From the story:
“In today’s interconnected world, mobile device are gradually becoming ubiquitous and helping us transcend many boundaries – geographical, economic, and social, among others,” said Dr. Guruduth Banavar, director of IBM Research – India and global leader of the IBM Research mobile communication initiative.
What we think?
Mobile enterprise is a rapidly growing market, and IBM is actually ideally placed to develop for it. Major problems for mobile enterprise applications have arisen over actual mobile devices. It’s expensive for a company to provide all of it’s employees with devices capable of handling advanced mobile applications. In the case of employees already having smartphones, it’s hard to guarantee that an enterprise app will work on all the different platforms. However, cloud-computing has proven to be a solution here. With a home server, a company can run the application at the home office, and simply push the result out to employees regardless of their handset. And with IBMs announcement regarding cloud-computing and large businesses, it seems certain these two projects will intersect.
