Mobility Moves from 'Nice to Have' to 'Must Have' for Large US Healthcare Insurer

A BriefingsDirect interview on how mobility proves a game-changer in the newly changing landscape of healthcare insurance.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Kony, Inc.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect interview, coming to you from the recent Kony World 2015 Conference in Orlando.

Gardner

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of penetrating discussions on the latest in enterprise mobility. We're here to explore advancements in mobile applications design and deployment technologies across the full spectrum of edge devices and operating environments.

Our next innovation interview focuses on how a large US insurance carrier, based in the Midwest, has improved its applications’ lifecycle to make mobility a business strength.

To learn how, please join me now in welcoming our guest, Scott Jessee, Vice President of IT for an Illinois health insurance provider. Welcome to BriefingsDirect, Scott.

Scott Jessee: Thanks, Dana, I appreciate it.

Gardner: Help us understand, first and foremost, where your organization is in regard to mobility. Are you taking requests from individual parts of your company, the one-off app, are you yet progressing toward lifecycle, or a strategic approach to mobility? Where do you stand?

Jessee: It’s important to think about where we came from. When we started off in mobile, it was not an imperative. It was not something where we had to get in. It was a nice-to-have that was in the forefront, but there wasn’t enough return on investment (ROI) in people’s minds. That shifted quickly in our business model when -- from a sales’ perspective -- it became an absolute requirement that we needed to have mobile in order for us to complete our sales.

Jessee

So fast-forward to where we are now. We've been running with this for a little bit and we're primarily focusing on the consumer market, which is also exciting for us. We're in healthcare, and with the Affordable Care Act, and with lot of shifts and distribution channels, there has been a stronger need for us to have to focus on the consumer.

From a mobile perspective, most of our feedback and requests are driven in that fashion. We had to ask, "What could we do to engage through mobility? What could we do to give them more value as a product through mobility? And, how could we give it to them in a fast manner?" All those dimensions are hitting us pretty heavy right now in terms of what we are trying to think ahead for.

Gardner: Are you delivering mobility on an application-by-application basis? Or can you create a significant platform or reuse benefit in how you produce mobile applications?

Focus on multichannel

Jessee: For us, one of the biggest things from that point of view is getting a mobile application at the consumer level where we permanently focus on multichannel. That's huge for us, because the market is demanding you to have multiple devices, and there are more-and-more devices each and every year.

You have Samsung for the Android side, you have your iOS Apple on your Apple side, and then you have the tablets and smartphones and soon-to-be wearable devices. There is a plethora of different demands that people want to consume the information transaction that you get them in order to have the experience that they want.

From our perspective, we try to be as savvy as we can with that, and we leverage the Kony Platform to help us achieve that. We wouldn't be able to have as lean of a staff as we do to help support and drive that forward. And it’s primarily because the fact we can do some level of "develop once" and then deliver out through these different devices over a period of time. So it’s been big gains for us.

Gardner: What are the business benefits that going with mobile apps bring?

When they come to us with new pieces that they want, we can typically do it in six to eight weeks, compared to a three- or four-month cycle on the website.

Jessee: We get feedback on from our business folks that it's different than the web. We're able to deliver faster than we can in the web apps space. They're more satisfied on delivery time and cycle time. When they come to us with new pieces that they want, we can typically do it in six to eight weeks, compared to a three- or four-month cycle on the website. That’s just the nature of what we are doing. So they smile with us a little more in the mobile space, which is good.

You hit on metrics. We have good analytics we could provide in terms of page-views that they see. If they're trying to deliver a new content or something to that effect, we could show them that this worked, and this didn't work. We also have individual plans/states that own their marketing efforts. Based on their individual campaigns, we are able to provide them metrics of a particular state is seeing an uptake in downloads or usage of the mobile app.

So those are the two key things I think that they like about what we are able to deliver with them as relates to those two concepts.

Gardner: You mentioned that sales was an early and important part of the mobile app drive. Has it progressed beyond that? Are there other aspects of the business -- whether it's closing out on insurance policies, payments, payer/provider relations in organization and management, all the above -- where you've now extended your mobile drive from that originating beachhead of sales?

Jessee: You mentioned providers and other use cases like that. They haven’t surfaced too much for us. A lot of it goes back to the Affordable Care Act and the fact that we hadn't looked at consumers for such a long time. We date back in healthcare for the longest period, and it hasn't always been about the consumer, because that's not how we made our money or progressed forward to the revenue stream. Now, that’s becoming a huge piece for us.

Extend and differentiate

We're back-stepping a little bit, which is why we are investing so much time. The consumer use case is such a big and important example because want to try to not just hit parity, but we want to also extend and differentiate beyond that.

So we are playing a little bit of catch-up in that regard. The other piece that we see does tie back to the sales piece as well, which is, if we could show differentiation through the sales channel, we could say to brokers that this is what we are doing to help improve wellness and improve access to care. It ends up heading these other use case examples you talk about indirectly, not necessarily directly, but ultimately. That's the hopeful outcome that we get out of it.

Gardner: Now, we're here at Kony World 2015, and one of the things we're hearing about is the importance of the user experience. Now that you're dealing with the Affordable Care Act, you're in more of a marketplace. The way in which your application comes across to a prospective insurance client compares to the other insurance organizations that they might be perusing. So how does the user experience factor into your development and deployment strategy, and how is Kony helping you with that?

Jessee: The big thing this week here at Kony World that was exciting to us is seeing the further enhancements of their Visualizer 2.0 product. Visualizer 2.0 allows marketing and communication leaders to sit up front and design the look/feel of a mobile application using an Adobe Photoshop-type experience. Our marketing communication teams demand this, because user experience is king.

The new imperative is consumer experience. You need to have something that people can use easily.

The new imperative is consumer experience. You need to have something that people can use easily, efficiently, and meet the demands that they're looking for as it relates to the functions they need to accomplish, and then beyond that what's your other value opportunities.

Kony does a great job of setting us up for success in that regard. In addition to the productivity gains we get out of this, they have good tools that will help us provide this customer experience in ways that we could show marketing communications to ask, "What do you think. Let's tweak it. Let’s alter it."

We could leverage agency input in a more efficient streamlined manner for the user interfaces that we create. So all those things are really going to springboard us forward, so we are not spending as much time doing it. From the visual consuming perspective, it should be a better experience, and that’s what we are hoping to get out of it, and showcasing the future opportunities there, too.

Gardner: The thing that’s been intriguing for me here at Kony World is I see their application marketplace and the new application, Kony Sales. This might not be an exact fit for you and your vertical industry, but it seems to me that they're taking a step toward having a packaged application targeted at a specific industry that takes you maybe 80 percent of the way you need to be with a lot of the back-end integration in place, with a lot of the ability to customize, but still governed by the IT department.

So, as the IT person, you're going to get a control over who can do what, but you're also going to have your end users, your line-of-business customers, getting a say as to what their app can do and can't do. It strikes me that another important part of user experience is having more say in an app and being part of the development process.

A step forward

Jessee: That's a big jump. I talked to [Kony CEO] Tom Hogan yesterday and he explained it really well, and he relates well to business users, too. Think of what’s going on with Salesforce, and how those constituencies and stakeholders that leverage that are used to configuring an application base or micro-applications. This is really taking Kony a step forward in meeting that marketplace and even extend it beyond that with the release of the both the marketplace and the two ready-to-go applications.

That's the opportunity at hand for potential business folks, as they've already been doing some of this today in some of the other venues, and now they have an opportunity to do this with Kony.

As an IT person, where we could really take advantage of it, is to reduce our workload with some of the configuration components, so it’s little off our hands. We could focus more on the marketplace, which would allow us to create these micro apps, these core functional areas, that we could then showcase, drop in, share, etc. That really puts us in a good position in terms of facilitating innovation, which obviously is hot in healthcare and all industries, but helps you further move that ball forward.

Gardner: What about the issue of security? Because you're in healthcare and regulatory compliance is so important, how do you see the security with the mobile application developing, and how again does that integrated platform -- write once, run everywhere -- benefit you?

That's the opportunity at hand for potential business folks, as they've already been doing some of this today in some of the other venues, and now they have an opportunity to do this with Kony.

Jessee: That’s a really hard part, especially in mobile. If you think back 10 years ago on the web space, security was probably where mobile is now. In 2013, there were no publicized or known mobile risks that were made, but in 2014 I think there were 9 or 10. So that was a big jump from 0 to 9 or 10 of big named companies.

What’s ahead in 2015 is even scarier, but that relates to what Kony offers. Tom Hogan showed today what they're trying to drive toward, and he used the acronym S-A-U-C-E to describe the value they are driving with their solutions: Security, Agility, Usability, Certainty, and Efficiency. The first one being security in priority order, which puts me at ease.

One of the things that has helped is through some of the security components in Kony. They've been pretty up-to-date with some of the trends that we pull from our third-party auditors that are looking at our mobile applications. It showcases things like SSL pinning, including that in your code, and helping you facilitate the transactions the right way. So that’s a good thing for us.

I think an opportunity for Kony is to continue to showcase those specifics to not just the customer base but the non-customer base. Mobile is going to continue to get exponentially more challenging when it comes to security, because the threats out there are just starting to hit it and they are just getting fresh into it.

Internet of Things

Gardner: Looking forward now to what’s going to come down the highway. We hear about the Internet of Things. We're seeing more and more, in healthcare, data being derived from sensors and devices, and we are seeing closer partnership between payers and providers when it comes to data sharing in the healthcare sector. So where does healthcare and mobility go for you over the next three to five years?

There was another interesting tidbit here at the show, where they said IDC is projecting that by 2017, 25 percent of IT budgets will be devoted in some way to mobility. Does that strike you as a low ball, and how important is mobility going to be to your IT budget?

Jessee: From a budgetary perspective that’s probably a fair guess, because mobility is also being redefined over time. A few years ago, it was just a smartphone, but now it’s people moving around, doing activities, transacting against a multitude of different devices, and I think wearable is a great example of that.

Mobile is going to continue to get exponentially more challenging when it comes to security, because the threats out there are just starting to hit it and they are just getting fresh into it.

What do wearables mean to us? It’s an unknown for us, and it’s on our radar that we need to identify some potential use cases, but we haven’t seen enough of it yet. We've got the Fitbits that are out there that are pretty hot, but now you have got the watches that are coming out. Samsung had theirs last year; Apple is doing theirs this year. What is that going to look like? We are not a 100 percent sure yet.

From our perspective, it’s making sure we have a flag against it for us to see what we could potentially do. It’s a little abstract for us to actually activate against, but we're not leaving it to rest either.

Gardner: And the issue about the sensors and the Internet of Things. Do you consider that mobility or is that a separate area, big data perhaps? How do you see the mobile drive for user experience and life cycle benefits now, and how does that compare to that Internet of Things and sensors and data in healthcare?

Jessee: It’s both. When you say mobility and big data, it goes two ways. One, it’s the consuming of these different sensors across mobile devices and mobile transactions that take place.

The other thing that happens is on the big data front is that it’s an opportunity to collect data and understand your consumer base, to understand your providers, to make better decisions, to help add value along the chain. But it’s two-way information that you have to collect in order to really activate both sides of the house, but they play together. They both have to.

Gardner: I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been learning about how advancements in mobile applications, design, and deployment technologies are bringing new productivity benefits across the growing spectrum of edge devices in mobile applications’ life cycle. We have also seen how quality, speed and value are rapidly increasing, thanks to the Kony Mobility Platform.

So a big thank you to our guest, Scott Jessee, Vice President for IT at a large Illinois healthcare insurance provider. Thanks so much, Scott.

Jessee: Thank you, Dana. I appreciate it.

Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience for joining this special podcast series, coming to you from the recent Kony World 2015 Conference in Orlando.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Kony-sponsored BriefingsDirect IT discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Kony, Inc.

A BriefingsDirect interview on how mobility proves a game-changer in the newly changing landscape of healthcare insurance. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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Kony Executive Burley Kawasaki on Best Tips for Attaining Speed in Mobile Apps Delivery

A BriefingsDirect interview on the growing need for mobile apps and Kony's newly announced tools to help the line of business go mobile.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Kony, Inc.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect interview, coming to you from the Kony World 2015 Conference on Feb. 4 in Orlando.

Gardner

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of penetrating discussions on the latest in enterprise mobility. We're here to explore advancements in applications design and deployment technologies across the full spectrum of edge devices and operating environments.

For our next interview we welcome Burley Kawasaki, Senior Vice President of Products at Kony.

Burley Kawasaki: Hi, thanks, Dana. Glad to be here. It has been an exciting week. There are lots of great customer discussions and partner discussions going on.

Gardner: Before we explore the Kony World news, what's going on in the enterprise mobility marketplace? What are enterprises looking for in their mobility strategy?

Kawasaki: Obviously, mobility has proven that it’s not just a passing fad. It's really evolved over the last four or five-plus years. Initially, most companies were just trying to get one or two apps out in the public app store.

Kawasaki

Many started with some type of branded consumer apps, what are called business-to-consumer (B2C) applications, and they were willing to make the investments to make it have a fantastic user experience. They would try to make this a way for customers to experience and engage the brand. A lot of times you saw this being built and launched by the marketing organization inside an enterprise.

Now, what we're seeing is a shift. As people are looking for the next set of ways to exploit mobility, they're looking internal, inside their enterprise. They're looking at what I refer to as or business-to-employee (B2E) applications.

But instead of one or two apps, there are literally dozens or hundreds of mobilized processes and applications that most larger enterprises are looking to build as they start looking at all the internal processes. It could be mobilizing sales or employees, looking at support out in the field with field technicians, or providing self-service access to vacation requests.

There are a number of challenges this creates. One is lack of skills. If you're building one or two, you can probably muster the technical expertise or you can outsource and hire an agency or someone to build it. If you're looking to supply dozens -- some larger enterprises are looking at hundreds of internal-facing mobile apps -- that really highlights the imbalance between the demand from the business stakeholders and the supply of IT skills, resources, and technical talent.

Gardner: So, it's important in the marketplace for enterprises to recognize that this is a problem, this gaping hole between what is demanded in terms of mobile apps and development and what they can deliver. How are Kony and others in your ecosystem, your solution partnerships, coming together to allow them to leap that hurdle?

Build applications quickly

Kawasaki: Kony, since day one, has focused on how to drive faster and faster acceleration of the full development process. That's part of our core value proposition of rapidly delivering great mobile apps by providing tools and platforms to help build applications more quickly.

When we talk about building anything custom, there is a certain amount of time, typically three to six months that you spend, not just for the development, but to map out the requirements to do all the testing and final deployment. And with any custom software development, you can only compress it so far, and there's a certain amount of skills and expertise that you need.

To answer your question, we think that there needs to be other types of models for ultimately creating these internal mobile applications. The trend that you're starting to see, and that we believe is really going to take off, is a move away from custom, bespoke development of each and every app, to much more of an assembly and configuration model.

If you look at building a home, for example, there was a time where you had to custom build all of the parts to your home. You would go out, cut down the trees, and do everything from scratch, but that was a hugely inefficient process.

Now, essentially, homes are componentized. You can find standard sizes lumber parts. Large parts of your home may be prefabricated and it's just a matter of assembling and configuring them to meet your needs.

Many industries have realized the benefits of moving to assembly and configuration, as opposed to custom built.

We've seen the same assembly across a number of industries, like the auto industry. Many industries have realized the benefits of moving to assembly and configuration, as opposed to custom built.

We're seeing this in software as well. There was a day where everyone used to build their own enterprise resource planning (ERP) system or their own sales automation system. Now, people have moved to the configuration of packaged software. Mobile applications are now at the tipping point where they need to have a different way that will address the explosion in demand that I was describing.

There are a couple of things that we think are required to create this new model. One is that you need to have an ecosystem that provides pre-built components. Obviously, you can't assemble things if there is nothing to assemble from. So there needs to be an ecosystem of components.

Then, there needs to be some type of tooling that allows you to assemble the components without having to be a developer, but more of a visual drag and drop type of composition experience.

And then once you have done that, it can't just be a pretty picture. It needs to actually somehow run and make its way down to your phone or to your device. So there has to be some type of execution or dynamic run capability behind the description of what you have created.

Those are the three requirements. Of course, we have just announced this week some software that addresses each of those categories.

Major announcements

Gardner: Well, let's delve into them a little bit. There were three major announcements around your Marketplace, your Modeler, and also an example of how these come together in your first prepackaged application called the Kony Sales App.

Kawasaki: I'll talk about each of these. I'll start with the Marketplace. As I said, to make this practical and useful for our customers, we need to be able to create a way to find and discover pre-built components. Some of these components Kony may build ourselves, but we're also working with a number of very talented leading edge partners of ours -- independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SI’s), who are also contributing prebuilt components.

This week, Feb. 4, we launched Marketplace. If you go out to community.kony.com/marketplace, you can browse. We're adding partners on an ongoing basis, but you'll see some of the early solutions that are available in the Marketplace. That’s the first part of the announcement.

The second piece is around how to assemble these into an actual application, a new product called Kony Modeler. Unlike some of our prior products, our developer tools, these do not require development backgrounds.

The typical profile of a user of Kony Modeler would be either a business analyst or someone closer to the business who knows how to drag and drop, to define what the end-user experience should be for your mobile app, knows how to describe the process or the workflow that has to occur, knows how to take those forms that they've painted, and be able to map it to some backend business data, coming from a system like SAP or Salesforce.

Unlike some of our prior products, our developer tools, these do not require development backgrounds.

As long as you can do that, you don’t have to be a developer and drop into code. You can describe this visually. You can drag and drop. Then, when you're done, the important thing is that it’s not just a picture that you print out and you throw over the wall to your developer. This description of your application then gets pushed out instantaneously to our cloud run time.

We've extended our backend-as-a-service, what we call Kony MobileFabric, so that it takes this model, this description of the mobile app, and will download it to your device and run it. Then, the next time as an end-user, if you are using one of these apps, you just automatically get whatever changes or updates have been made. You don’t have to go out to an app store and find a new app. It just automatically is part of your app.

As an analogy, in the same way if I use any software-as-a-service (SaaS) software, I won't have to install a new app on my laptop. I just go out to my web browser, and next time I log in, it's always up-to-date.

Gardner: It sounds as if this has some of the greater elements of platform-as-a-service (PaaS), but the tooling is designed for that business-analyst level. It also gives you some of those benefits of rapid iterations. You can change and adjust. You can customize to different types of user within the group that you're targeting. And all of this, I assume, is at also low cost, given that it's a SaaS based approach. Tell us a little bit about why this is like PaaS, but PaaS-plus.

Non-developer experience

Kawasaki: PaaS typically has been targeted primarily toward developers. And it’s maybe a higher level productivity for developers, but you still have to write code against software development kits (SDKs) or other application programming interfaces (APIs). Kony Modeler provides a non-developer experience.

The other big thing, and you pointed it out, is that it really does lower all of the infrastructure, hardware, and software costs that are required, because it’s purely cloud-based. It makes it not only lower cost from a total cost of ownership (TCO) standpoint, but it also accelerates the whole development cycle.

I think about this as a shift away from a classic waterfall-type model, to much more of an agile model. In the old model, you spend three to six months trying to go through and nail the requirements and hand it off to your dev team. Then, they go off, and you find out, only when it's in final QA, that it doesn't look right on the device, or it comes back and the business has changed their mind. That never happens, right?

It makes it not only lower cost from a total cost of ownership (TCO) standpoint, but it also accelerates the whole development cycle.

Modeler allows you to very quickly iterate a working application to release in a matter of days and be able to do testing with your end-users. Based on their feedback, I can make updates on an agile basis and continuously iterate on functionality or enhancements to the application.

Gardner: Burley, it also sounds like you're able to bring A/B testing type activities to a different class of user, where you don't always know what your requirements are precisely, but you can throw things on the wall, try them out, see what works, and iterate on that. I don’t recall too much of that capability being available to a business analyst type of user.

Kawasaki: You're correct. Usually, there is this very extended process, where a business analyst has to document everything in some thick specification, and even if you have it wrong or you are uncertain, whatever you communicate out to the dev team is what they go off and build.

So it’s not that this does away with requirements, but it does allow more flexibility to change or to test. And I'd agree. I think the responsiveness will allow much more experimentation and innovation. It's better to fail fast. If you have tried something out and it's not delivering the results, you haven't invested a huge amount of time and cost to learn that.

Gardner: And another appealing aspect of this for IT and operations is that this isn't shadow IT. This is under the auspices of IT. They can bring in governance. They can audit as necessary and make sure the right backend sources are being accessed in the right way, with the right privilege and access controls. They can monitor security. We talked about how it's better than PaaS, but it's also better than shadow IT for a lot of reasons.

Lack of skills

Kawasaki: It is. We were talking earlier about the skills shortage, and if you look at the stats or the data, most industry analysts predict that up to 60 percent or 70 percent or more of mobile development is outsourced today, to either an interactive agency, a systems integrator, or someone else, because of lack of skills.

So it has been outsourced to some third party, and who knows what technologies they are using to build the app. It's outside the typical controls or governance of IT. So it's not only shadow; it's dark matter. You don't even know it exists; it’s completely hidden.

Yet, at some point, inevitably, those apps that you may have outsourced for your first version, it’s not just a first version release. You want to update it sometimes monthly. So it has to come back into IT at some point, for no other reason than it's connecting and talking to enterprise data in the back end. It's connecting to other IT controlled systems, and so there is a huge amount of risk and costs associated if these things are completely hidden off the grid.

Gardner: Let's take this from the abstract to the concrete. We actually have an application now in play called the Kony Sales App. Who is that targeted to, how does it work, and what do you expect to be some of the proof point metrics of this in usage compared to how organizations conduct themselves with customer relationship management (CRM), especially if there is multiple CRMs in play in an organization?

Kawasaki: That's a great point. First of all, this is the first of a series of what we call ready-to-run applications. And the reason we call it ready-to-run is that it's a packaged app. This isn't a custom or bespoke app, but it's pre-connected and pre-integrated to the common back end, in case of CRM what most companies are using, something like Salesforce or SAP on the back end.

So we've taken a task-oriented approach and created a modular micro app approach that really is meant to be very easy and engaging for the end-user.

So it comes ready to run, but like packaged software or SaaS software, it allows you the ability to configure and customize it, because everyone’s sales processes or their user base is going to be different. That's where the Modeler tool allows you to configure it.

So when you purchase Kony Sales, you get not only the application, but the use of Kony Modeler to be able to customize and configure it. And then, as you make changes, you push it live, and again, it deploys using the SaaS model you were describing.

To talk a little bit more about Kony Sales, we think it's a new style of mobile apps, what I will refer to as a micro app. Historically, people thought of CRM software, and I am overgeneralizing, but as big, somewhat monolithic, applications.

One of the historical challenges with CRM usage is that you had to bring your laptop with you, and sales reps are notorious at not completing data in a timely fashion. It takes a lot of mandates, top-down from the sales leadership, to get data into the system so you can get accurate reporting. It's one of the age-old problems.

We believe that if instead of trying to get the whole CRM application crammed down onto a four-inch screen, with all the complexity that it requires, you target very specific action-oriented micro apps that a sales rep can do very quickly on the go, that doesn't take a lot of training, and doesn't take a lot of thought. They can very quickly look up and see their accounts, or they can very quickly log a call they have made.

So we've taken a task-oriented approach and created a modular micro app approach that really is meant to be very easy and engaging for the end-user, which in this case is a sales rep.

User experience

Gardner: And again, for the understanding of how this all works across multiple endpoints, regardless of what your sales force is using for their mobile device, this is going to come down. They are going to get that user experience and that interface that the craftsmen behind the app demanded and designed.

Kawasaki: That's right. Kony Sales is multi-channel. It works across phones, tablets, iOS, Android, and importantly, it does not replace your existing CRM data. It extends the CRM systems you already have, but makes them much, much easier to very quickly get access to.

Also using Mobile First types of approaches, and by that I mean if you are a sales rep, very likely you are on the road or in an airplane. How many people have tried to use whatever CRM client, even some of the web mobile experiences, to get data into Salesforce or SAP? It's all web-based, HTML5-based, and it doesn’t work if you're not online.

One of the things we designed in from day one was that you have to be able to operate in an "occasionally connected" mode. So if you are offline, either because you're out in the field talking to your customer, or you're in an airplane you can still have the same easy access. Then, when you're connected again, it will synchronize and handle updating SAP or Salesforce in the background.

Gardner: We're almost out of time, but I wanted to look a little bit to the future roadmap. Now that we have the model of the Modeler, the Marketplace and these ready-to-run apps, what comes next -- more apps, bigger marketplace, or is there another technology shoe to drop?

Kawasaki: It's more apps certainly, and not just from Kony, but from our partners. When we did some of our initial planning and research, the most commonly mobilized processes were ones that were customer facing or customer impacting, just because of the benefits and the ROI.

So we started with sales. We're going to release our next one, which will be around field service. It really helps engage at the point that you're supporting and serving your customer.

It really helps engage at the point that you're supporting and serving your customer.

There are a set of these that we are working on, but I think also importantly, we're working on really making our partner ecosystem trained, ready to use Modeler, and to build very unique and differentiated applications to publish to the marketplace.

We have a couple of examples of these ready-to-run apps that are compelling from our partners that you will hear more about, and that list will continue to grow over the coming weeks and months.

Gardner: And of course there's a lot more information online at kony.com about these products and services that you've announced. And you are going to be taking this out on the road to Frankfurt, Europe, Dubai, and the Middle East quite soon.

Kawasaki: That's right. It's going to be fun getting to engage our global customer base and talk about some of the innovations and get their input on what types of apps they're trying to build.

Gardner: Well, very good. I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been learning more about how advancements in mobile applications’ design and deployment technologies are bringing new productivity benefits across the growing spectrum of edge devices and use cases. And we have seen how quality, speed, and value are rapidly increasing, thanks to the Kony mobility platform approach.

So a big thank you to our guest, Burley Kawasaki, Senior Vice President of Products at Kony. Thank you, sir.

Kawasaki: All right, thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And a big thank you also to our audience for joining this special podcast series coming to you directly from the Kony World 2015 Conference in Orlando.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Kony-sponsored BriefingsDirect IT mobility discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Kony, Inc. 

A BriefingsDirect interview on the growing need for mobile apps and Kony's newly announced tools to help the line of business go mobile. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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