Take a Deep Dive on How Enterprise App Stores Help Drive Productivity

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on the growing importance of enterprise app stores in moving organizations to a self-service model that reduces both complexity and delays in getting applications to end users.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Embarcadero Technologies.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on how enterprise app stores are quickly creating productivity and speed-to-value benefits for PC users and IT departments alike.

We’ll specifically examine what steps businesses can take to build and develop their own enterprise app stores for mainstream use. We'll further see what rapid and easy access to self-service apps on PCs and notebook computers through such app stores is doing for businesses.

The popularity of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, on one hand, has energized users, but on the other hand it’s caused IT and business leaders to scramble to adjust to new models of applications delivery.

We’ll explore here how app stores are part of the equation for improved work and process success on and off the job. We’ll see how Embarcadero’s AppWave solution brings the mobile apps experience to millions of PC users in their workplace in the enterprise.

We’ll also hear from the author of a recent Ovum white paper on why app stores are so important for enterprises, as they consider ways to better track, manage, and distribute all of their applications.

The popularity of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, on one hand, has energized users, but on the other hand, it’s caused IT and business leaders to scramble to adjust to new models of applications delivery.

Please join me now in welcoming our panel. We're joined today by Tony Baer, Principal Analyst at Ovum. Welcome back to the show, Tony.

Tony Baer: Hey, Dana. Good to be here.

Gardner: We’re also here with Michael Swindell, Senior Vice President of Products and Marketing at Embarcadero Technologies. Welcome, Michael.

Michael Swindell: Hi. Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And we’re also here with Richard Copland, Principal Innovation Consultant at Logica. Welcome, Richard. [Disclosure: Embarcadero is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Richard Copland: Hi, Dana.

Gardner: Tony, let me start with you. You've written a white paper in the recent past on app stores and why they’re important in enterprises. Were you surprised in any way at how broad this app store model can be used and is starting to be used for all sorts of applications?

Concept leap

Baer: I was a little bit surprised because there is certainly a concept leap from a $1.99 little applet that you pull down from the iPhone app store or from the Android marketplace to a full-blown enterprise desktop application.

That being said, it’s not surprising, given that there’s been a huge demand from the bottom-up, from the people in the workplace. So it’s a phenomenon that’s probably better known as the consumerization of IT -- "I have these sophisticated mobile devices and tablets. Why can’t I get that easy to use experience on my regular machine for my day job?"

Therefore, the demand for the comfort and convenience of that was inevitably bound to spread into the enterprise environment. You've seen that manifested in a number of ways. For example, companies have basically embraced more social collaboration. And you’re also starting to see some use of many of these new form factors.

So again, what Embarcadero has been starting to introduce is symbolic in a way that’s really not surprising.

Gardner: Richard Copland, any thoughts on this as well? Tell us a bit about your organization, Logica, and your role as a Principal Innovation Consultant.

Copland: My role as a Principal Innovation Consultant is effectively twofold. It's to find new things and introduce new things to our clients. Something innovative to me is something that's new to you and provides a benefit. This can be cash, people, or green ideas. I spend my day looking at cool new stuff, which means ways of working, technologies, partners, and even wacky research coming out of the various universities here in Europe.

I get involved in schedules of client discussions, and people look to me and my team to bring ideas to life, to help answer that question, which is a challenge where there must be a better way. An example of that is the enterprise app store being a better way for things. Then, it’s unpacking that and exploring how you might help create that vision of the answer and empower them to believe that these things are possible now.

A bit about Logica: We're a business and technology service company. We provide business consulting, system integration, and outsourcing to our clients around the world including many of Europe’s largest businesses.

Last year, we did just under £4 billion globally with 800 million of that being here in the UK. We create value by successfully integrating people, business, technology, and a key part of this is the innovation piece. Clients look to us to bring innovation and innovative things, and Embarcadero's AppWave and the concept of the business application certainly falls into that category.

In terms of those larger trends, which are driving or almost overseeing the consumerization of IT, I step it back, and say that it’s almost as we are as a service concept which is the fragmentation and segmentation of people looking to get more and more value being directed to them, specifically to their needs, and as a result of that, it’s the on-demand concept.

Generation Next

For me, it’s also the whole Generation Next piece which is about a whole new generation that is educated and tech-savvy. They're multitasking all the time. They work as consumers. They're purchasing products and customize them to their needs in terms of their lifestyles. So they’re regularly sharing insight and comment on things which are good for them.

That’s playing out in terms of lifestyle and that's being brought into the business scenario, whereby the formal and informal hierarchies of organizations are blurring.

Another trend that I see, and a lot of our clients in the conversations that we have see, is this whole global talent contest, by which clients are struggling to maintain, obtain, and keep satisfied Generation Next with the latest technology. Why should they legitimately step back in time in the tools that they will use in their role, if it doesn’t provide and support their last stop. It’s a real challenge for them.

Gardner: Michael Swindell, when we see longer term trends, and then new innovations, one of those trends has been the need to rationalize applications. Almost every enterprise I talk to rarely knows how many applications they have, rarely knows to what degree they’re being used, and has no clue as to how to sunset them or bring this sprawl under control. It seems that that’s a long-term trend trying to rationalize apps, but at the app store model, innovation brings some sanity to that and buy-ins from the users.

Is there a win-win possibility here with app stores helping organizations manage their apps better, and yet, getting the buy-in from the users to accelerate how that goes about by them voting and either installing and uninstalling these apps rather rapidly?

Swindell: There are really two sides to the benefit of using the app store methodology for those problems. There's an organizational side of understanding application usage, as you said maybe sunsetting applications, understanding how applications are used within their organization, so that they can make good decisions.

Then we have the user side, where users have a lot more information that they can provide that’s very useful for both the organization and other users.

The app store metaphor works very well in sharing that type of information. It gives the organization usage information and statistics, and the demand information that's valuable for the organization to plan and understand their application usage. It also provides information to other users on the applicability of applications for certain scenarios, whether applications are good or bad for a particular scenario.

This has worked well in the mobile space with public app stores, and we see that there's a lot of applicability inside the firewall, inside organizations, to be able to use this information and create more value out of their applications and to help users get more value and understanding about their applications.

Gardner: Tony, back to you. In your white paper, it seems that there's an economic value here, that we're just sort of scratching the surface of. It seems that we know that the consumers like app stores, based on how they vote with their dollars, whether it's $0.99 or more. It’s just a huge success for Apple and others are jumping on the bandwagon.

But it seems to me that getting the transparency, seeing the trends, and being able to sunset and better manage their apps has got a fairly significant economic value to it. Furthermore, users perhaps will only be using resources based on their needs. So there is sort of an efficiency aspect to this. Is that what you've found?

Traditional model

Baer: We've not done any scientific studies, but compare this model to the traditional application deployment model.

Number one, it's a much more of a long-fused process. There is elaborate planning of the rollout. You're trying to figure out all the different client targets that you're trying to address. Even if you do have locked-down machines, you're still going to have issues. Then, package the release,. Then, regression test it to death. Then distribution, and you actually get the thing installed. Hopefully, it's up during some off hour, let's say, at 3 a.m. Then, you prepare for all the support calls.

That's a pretty involved process. That consumes a lot of time both for the end user, who is waiting for the functionality that he or she may want -- or not. And it's also, of course, a considerable overhead in the IT organization.

If you take that all away into a more modular model, more like a radio broadcast model, essentially it becomes a lot more efficient. You lose all this lead time, and as Michael was talking about, you then get all the visibility for all these apps being consumed. End users have more sway. As long as they are authorized to use these apps, they have this choice.

So it's not that all of a sudden they have a whole number of apps that are loaded on their machine, whether they like it or not. We haven't done anything to quantify this, because trying to quantify productivity is like asking “what's the cost of downtime?” And in a lot of sectors that can be a very subjective number. But intuitively, this model, if it scales out, should basically provide a much lower cost of ownership and much greater satisfaction.

This model, if it scales out, should basically provide a much lower cost of ownership and much greater satisfaction.

Gardner: Richard, in your looking over the landscape for additional innovations, I can see how services orientation and cloud computing certainly dovetail with this, but it also seems to me that the need is for organizations to encourage users to change their habits. Maybe it's around the process level, instead of an application level or maybe simply adopting new applications quickly, rather than having to go through a long period of adjustment.

Is there something about the app store model that you think will encourage faster buy-in and perhaps a lot of organizations would incentivize or use social mechanisms to encourage users to adopt new technologies and new applications faster?

Copland: Undoubtedly. The whole socialization and the social trend which I see as probably the biggest driver behind this is for the way in which people use software and the way in which people comment on a software.

The organization will cluster around the toolkits for which the feedback from the users is positive. I can think of one large global financial organization here that has 5,000 apps within their world. They would look to simplify their landscape by over 60 percent, because they recognize that they've got so many kinds of individual pockets of activity going on in the organization.

And you need to support those individual pockets of activity that, in terms of your users in the tail effect, they’ll be the mainstream enterprise apps, such as Windows-based or Office-based, which the majority will use. But if you could tap into an environment, in which you are giving the people what they want, then the return on investment (ROI) from that is going to be a lot faster.

Cultural incentive

Gardner: We’ve certainly seen how the incentive is there from a cultural and popularity perspective, given what we’ve seen in the mobile space. There's a strong economic and productivity rationale for this in terms of both long-term IT trends, like rationalizing applications, and shorter-term trends, like incentivizing people to use the social mechanisms and adopt newer applications or processes or methods faster.

Now the question is: how do you do this? How do you take a legacy of hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of applications written for the PC, written across different platforms and different iterations over time and maturity levels of those platforms, and make them available through an app store?

Michael Swindell, tell me a little bit about AppWave and what it takes for an IT organization to make the transition from that long process that Tony outlined to a more streamlined app-store approach.

Swindell: The best way to describe AppWave is that it’s just a pretty simple three-step process. The first step is taking traditional software, which is traditionally complex for end users and for organizations to manage. This includes things like installations, un-installations, considerations about applications, of how they affect the users’ environment.

Then, converting those traditional software applications into the concept of apps where they are self-contained, don’t require installation, can be streamed and run to a user anywhere they are, and really delivering the mobile-like experience of mobile software to the more complex traditional desktop PC software.

AppWave has tooling that allows users to take their applications and convert them into apps. And that’s any type of application- commercial application or internally developed.

AppWave has tooling that allows users to take their applications and convert them into apps. And that’s any type of application -- commercial application or internally developed.

That's the first step. The second is to centralize those apps in an app store, where users can get to them, and where organizations can have visibility into their usage, manage access to them, etc. So the second step is simply centralizing those apps.

The third is the user experience. One of the key drivers behind the success of apps in the mobile space has been the visibility that users have into application availability. It’s very easy for users to search and find an app as they need it.

Think about how a user uses a mobile phone to come up with an app. Maybe they’re walking down the street, they see a business, and they have an idea, or they want directions to something. They can simply search in an app store on their mobile device and immediately get an app to solve that problem.

If you look in the business space and inside the workplace, when a user has a problem, they don’t really have a mechanism to sit down and search to solve a problem and then get an application to solve it immediately.

As we talked about earlier, and Tony really well-described that the process, once they identify an application to solve a problem, that can take weeks or months to roll out. so you don’t have that instant feedback.

Instantaneous experience

The user experience has to be instantaneous. An area that we focused on very heavily with AppWave is to provide the users an ability to search, find apps based on the problems that they’re trying to solve, and instantly run those apps, rather than having to go through a long process.

Gardner: Michael, I’d like to hear more about how you go about that. But before we do, let me check in with our other panelists.

Tony, this sounds like it’s something quite new. As you pointed out, in the past and for the most part, in the present, in an enterprise, a user might have a need, wish they had a tool, a utility, a macro, any kind of a helping hand. Rather than go to IT and wait in line, sign some sort of a requisition, or go through a PO process, they probably just said, "Oh, the heck with it. I'll make do with what I have."

But now, we're giving people the opportunity to self-serve, search in the moment of need, and then satisfy that need with the click of a button. It sounds to me that it’s going to really enhance user productivity, the user's ability to innovate themselves, rather than just sit back and go with the flow. Am I overstating it?

Baer: From the end-user standpoint, there certainly is quite a win to this. But we also have to look at the fact that this is going to change the way IT serves the organization. At least this aspect of it is really going to become more of a service provider. And there are a lot of implications for that.

From the end-user standpoint, there certainly is quite a win to this. But we also have to look at the fact that this is going to change the way IT serves the organization.

For one thing, IT has to be more responsive but they also have to work on more of a shorter fuse, almost like a just-in-time type of model.

That being said, there's no free lunch in all this, and it still requires management. For example, we still need to worry about dealing with security governance, managing consumption, and also making sure that you lock down, or secure the licensing issues. As I said, there’s no free lunch, but compare that to the overhead of the traditional application distribution and deployment process.

So again, from the end user standpoint, it should be a win-win, but from the IT standpoint, it's going to mean a number of changes. Also, this is breaking new ground with a number of the vendors. What they need to do is check on things such as licensing issues, because what you're really talking about is a more flexible deployment policy.

Long-term, it's definitely a win-win. Short-term, there are adjustments to be made by IT and also by the software industry.

Gardner: Just as a quick observation, managing licenses is so difficult. Many organizations will just pay a blanket fee, not even bother to audit, or do anything they can to avoid the vendor audit. With the app-store approach, they would have real data, know exactly who is using what, and pay only what they had to. So I think that there's a hurdle to adjust to on the licensing, but there might actually be a strong benefit.

Changing the dynamic

Back to Richard Copland. On this notion that users, when empowered to download and find apps based on search, based on the library, based on what other users are passing along as what’s worked for them as users in the organization, it strikes me as really changing the dynamic itself.

Do you follow my thread on this? Do you think I'm going too far, and can we perhaps make the association that app stores can fundamentally change the way workers behave in an innovation sense?

Copland: Absolutely. You’re on the money with regard the direction of travel. We talked a little bit about looking at the mobile aspects of it and moving to this on-demand usage and the challenges for the organization to do that.

Certainly, the components within the AppWave solution give you the opportunity to move to more of what I would describe as smart working or remote working, by which the user doesn't necessarily have to come into the office to access the tools, which are traditionally being provided to them at their desk in their environment.

If you start remote working or are given a broader range of remote access, then you can be operating a much stronger work-life balance. So if you're in a situation where you’ve got a young family and you need to take the kids to school, you can come on and go off the company network and use the tools which are provided to you in a much more user-friendly flexible environment. That would be certainly from the user's perspective.

If you start remote working or are given a broader range of remote access, then you can be operating a much stronger work-life balance.

From the business’s perspective, I start moving to a scenario where I don't necessarily need to maintain a real estate where if I’ve got 5,000 users, I need to have 5,000 desks. That certainly becomes quite empowering across the rest of the organization, and other stakeholders -- the facility’s officers, business managers -- start taking real notice of those types of savings and the nature of how work is achieved.

Gardner: Back to how this can work for organizations. Michael Swindell at Embarcadero, tell me about AppWave, and let's learn a bit about its heritage. It seems to me that this has been something that's not just a flash in the pan new for you. It's really an evolution of something you've been doing in the application development arena with tools. So perhaps it's time to learn a little bit about the legacy and history of how AppWave has evolved?

Swindell: This is the AppWave 2.0 platform, which is really the second generation of the platform. The original 1.0 platform was designed to help deliver Embarcadero's own products to its users. And the reason it was developed was that Embarcadero, as many ISVs have, has a portfolio of different products, over 20 tools in our portfolio. We wanted to provide those to customers so that they were much easier for the users to find and use the applications as they had a need.

As a problem arises, you didn't have to worry about whether or not software is already installed or whether or not you have it. You simply need to be able to search on the problem and then be able to pull up the Embarcadero application to solve that problem.

The first generation of this technology was designed specifically for those 20 products. We created app versions of our software. Then came the idea of the centralized app store and the user experience to search, find, and run those apps.

Gardner: This is fairly proven. How long this has been in use in terms of a technology and a platform itself?

Licensing core

Swindell: Two years for the platform. Then, the licensing core, which is really an important part. We talked a little bit about earlier about how license management is important in access control. The license core that provides both licensing and access control has actually been around for quite some time and managed the licenses. We've been developing the licensing technology for almost 10 years.

Gardner: So you're taking this and focusing it beyond that core 2.0 that you started with. Now we're looking at what custom apps, legacy apps, cross platform, what is it that an enterprise was interested in moving in an app store direction, and they are going to examine something like AppWave. How far and why can this be applicable in terms of their legacy, their installed base of apps?

Swindell: Our vision is any type of application in the organization will eventually be supported by AppWave. The initial support is for PC apps in organizations, which is the vast majority of productivity applications that end users need. It also is where the largest problem set is, both from an end-user perspective and from an organization's perspective.

So we're tackling the hardest problem first and then our plan is to roll in other type of apps, web apps, and applications that you might be using in an organization, using other types of delivery technologies.

But the idea is to take any type of these applications and present them as an app inside the AppWave ecosystem. So a user can have a centralized way to search for any type of app whether it’s a corporate HR, a web application, a hosted software as a service (SaaS ) application, or a PC application. Certainly, mobile would be an obvious direction as well.

The idea is to take any type of these applications and present them as an app inside the AppWave ecosystem.

Gardner: It seems that we’re also moving now to being able to manage our applications, not just in their entirety and in their traditional state, but perhaps even decomposing them and getting into more of a modular applications transformation benefit.

Tell me how the companies that you’re working with that are using AppWave are using this, not only to just repurpose existing apps, but to even transform those apps and present them in new and interesting ways.

Swindell: There's a variety of ways that organizations are delivering applications to users today. The wider variety of applications and different ways and repositories that they have for apps really makes it confusing for end users to be able to know where to find what applications are available.

When I talk to end users and to customers, if you ask them where they find their applications, you’ll get a different answer, depending on who you talk to in the organization or what type of application they’re thinking of.

One of the things that AppWave and the app store concept can do is to help create a centralized app view of the different types of applications and even the different types of services in your organization, and to be able to understand what’s available.

Common presentation

There are also opportunities for the same types of socialization and sharing of information and knowledge about services using the app store concept, as there is with apps.

The important thing is to take these different types of applications and present them in a common way in the same place, so that it really doesn’t matter whether the app is a web app or it’s a PC app. Users can find them, run them, and share information about them at the same place.

Gardner: Just to be clear, your technology allows for not only ISV-packaged apps, but also custom apps designed for your organization, by your organization. These can now also be brought into this corral more of a common denominator of all sorts of apps. Is that correct?

Swindell: Correct. And those apps can be comprised of a variety of different services, different types of technologies, but they’re presented to the end user in the same way as a Windows app or a Web app.

Gardner: Is there an additional technical benefit here in terms of sometimes what we see with SaaS and multitenancy in that the patching and the security and management of that application can be conducted centrally. Then, each time the user brings it down from the store, for example, he gets a fresh updated version. Is there a lifecycle benefit to how apps are managed as part and parcel with this?

Some applications or some data may be dependent on a particular version of an app or an application. By using apps and AppWave, you can roll back three versions and open that up without having to install it, find it, or anything.

Swindell: It makes it a lot easier for end users, because they don’t have to think about it. When they log into their app store environment, updates are automatic, and it’s also very visible. They can see what’s happening very similar to into a mobile device. You always know when there are updates available because you get an icon that tells you how many updates are available.

There's an additional benefit, especially with software modularization and compatibility between different versions, that AppWave can provide. By compartmentalizing applications, it allows apps to run side-by-side across multiple versions.

So some applications or some data may be dependent on a particular version of an app or an application. By using apps and AppWave, you can roll back three versions and open that up without having to install it, find it, or anything. So the isolation and the idea of apps can really help in that regard.

Gardner: Richard Copland, as someone who is out there hunting down innovations that they can bring to their user organization and their clients, was there anything about AppWave or app stores in general for enterprise use that was interesting and attractive to you that we perhaps haven’t hit on yet?

Copland: In AppWave and the Embarcadero team, we have a global innovation venture partner program. They were our recent winner. They went up against competition from around the world. We believe that the app store concept has got so much within it in terms of the user experience, the socialization aspects, and the collaboration aspects of it.

Bridging point

The area which we haven't touched on so much is that it's a bridging point between your legacy systems and your more visionary cloud-type solutions where you really are SaaS, on-demand and pay-per-click.

Gardner: I guess on-demand isn't so much concerned with where the app resides and how it's delivered across the wire, but really with the notion of organizations being able to allow their users to go into a process, find a solution, apply it, and even create new types of innovative work and workflows. It's really about choice, freedom and applicability rapidly, rather than over a long time that is the actual benefit around on-demand.

Copland: The thing that will kill innovation is just operating slowly. One of the biggest blockers that organizations face with regard to innovation is the nature of how that sets out and the speed at which they react to what are their internal ideas.

Swindell: You can look at this as being in a way -- and Dana and Richard you're hinting on that -- a cultural preparation for transition to the cloud, if indeed the cloud is suitable for specific parts of your application portfolio.

Gardner: Michael Swindell, for those organizations that are looking at cloud but are bit nervous and see some risk and lack of governance security control, is there something about app store that makes that bridging effect that Richard was alluding to, but in a way that is more enterprise ready. That is, something that gives command and control in terms of access, privilege, governance and management but also fosters that innovation and freedom.

You can look at this as being a cultural preparation for transition to the cloud, if indeed the cloud is suitable for specific parts of your application portfolio.

Swindell: It certainly is a way of operating that's very attractive, that there's a lot of interest in, and has a lot of obvious benefits. But there's also concern around the areas that you bring up. Having an on-premise private app store that runs within your organization that is on site really addresses a lot of those concerns and uses the cloud simply to deliver new applications and apps from ISVs and from other vendors.

Once they are inside your organization, they're operating within your security and governance environment. So you don't really have to worry about those concerns, but it still delivers a lot of the benefits of the user experience of cloud and the on-demand nature.

Gardner: I know this is going a little bit out further into the future and perhaps into the hypothetical. It sounds as if you can effectively use this app store model and technology and approach like AppWave to be a gateway for your internal PC apps, but that same gateway might then be applicable for all these other services.

But if the gateway app store model works for a class of apps, it might work for all apps. It really could be a governance and management capability well beyond just the ability to package and deliver apps in this fashion. What are your thoughts on that, Michael?

Driven by demand

Swindell: The foundation is there, and I think it will be demand driven by users. Every time we talk to a customer with AppWave, the list of possibilities and where customers want to use and take the environment is exciting, and the list continues to grow on how they can use it in the long-term.

So we're building facilities today to connect the private AppWaves into our cloud infrastructure, so that we can deliver certainly apps but there could be other types of services that connect into that as well.

Gardner: Okay, and just to be clear. AppWave is available now. I believe we have a 30-day free trial, is that correct?

Swindell: Yes, there is a free trial, and we also offer free version of AppWave that organizations can download and use today with free apps. There's an entire catalog of free apps that are included and are streamed down from our cloud.

So you can get set up and started with AppWave, using free apps in your organization. What can be added then is your own internal custom apps or commercial licenses that organizations have. So if you've hundreds of commercial licenses, you can add those in or add your own internally developed apps.

Once they are inside your organization, they're operating within your security and governance environment. So you don't really have to worry about those concerns.

Gardner: Very good, and where would one go to find out more about this?

Swindell: You can go to www.embarcadero.com/appwave and try it for free.

Gardner: Very good. I'm afraid we're out of time. You've been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on how enterprise app stores are quickly creating productivity and speed-to-value benefits for PC users and IT departments of like. I’d like to thank our guests: Tony Baer, Principal Analyst at Ovum. Thank you so much, Tony.

Baer: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: We've also been here with Michael Swindell, Senior Vice President of Products and Marketing for Embarcadero Technologies. Thank you, Michael.

Swindell: Thanks, Dana. It was a pleasure.

Gardner: And Richard Copland, Principal Innovation Consultant at Logica. Thanks so much, Richard.

Copland: Cheers, Dana. Cheers, guys.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. As always, thanks for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Embarcadero.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on the growing importance of enterprise app stores in moving organizations to a self-service model that reduces both complexity and delays in getting applications to end users. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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App Stores-They're Not Just for Consumers Any More, as More Enterprises Adopt the Model to Support Mobile Applications

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on the emerging concept of enterprise app stores based on the popular consumer model.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Partnerpedia.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on the impact that mobile devices and applications are having on enterprises. We'll specifically examine what steps businesses can take to manage mobile applications and develop their own versions of enterprise app stores.

The skyrocketing popularity of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets has, on one hand, energized users, but on the other hand, it has caused IT and business leaders to scramble to support these new clients productively and safely.

We'll explore how enterprise app stores are part of the equation for better mobile management and overall mobility-enabled work success.

We'll start by examining some of the driving trends around enterprise mobility with a principal analyst from Forrester Research. Then we'll hear from Partnerpedia on how enterprise app stores can be added to the usual mix of IT applications delivery and management strategies. [Disclosure: Partnerpedia is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

We're really at this rare moment in time for the technology sector, whether you're talking about vendors, end-users, or CIOs who are trying to manage all this.

Please join me now in welcoming our panel, John McCarthy, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. Welcome, John.

John McCarthy: Thanks, Dana. How are you today?

Gardner: I'm great. We are also here with Sam Liu, Vice President of Marketing at Partnerpedia. Welcome back, Sam.

Sam Liu: Hey, Dana. How are you doing?

Gardner: I'm doing great. John, let’s start with you. It seems that a day doesn’t go by when we don't see more data pointing to a sea change in how applications, communications, and information are being delivered to workers. I think this has a lot to do with the way these workers now want to gain access to these assets.

From your perspective, John, how profound is the shift that we're in? Is this iterative or are we in a real sea change, a real sort of shift in the landscape, a tectonic plate type of shift?

Rare moment in time

McCarthy: It’s definitely the latter. We're really at this rare moment in time for the technology sector, whether you're talking about vendors, end-users, or CIOs who are trying to manage all this. It’s not just mobile. It’s not just cloud. Software as a service (SaaS), smart computing, machine to machine, analytics, social, all these things are spinning up together to create an accelerating array of change in the marketplace.

Gardner: You mentioned cloud and SaaS. It seems to me that the mobility issue is almost accelerated in a virtuous cycle. That is to say, the more mobility, the more reliance on cloud, the richer and safer it is. The more confidence people have in cloud, the more they can do with their mobility. Is that the case? It’s an adoption vector of some sort?

McCarthy: You pointed it out very articulately. These things are feeding off of each other. As soon as I start talking about deploying mobile, and increasingly, it’s not just deploying mobile to my employees, but deploying mobile to my partners and customers, whether it’s B2B or B2C, I am talking about a much broader network problem.

So the network architectures of the cloud solutions are becoming almost synonymous with mobile solutions. So the two innovation cycles are intersecting and feeding off of each other.

Gardner: I'm sure we could spend an hour just talking about the network and the WAN optimization issues, but let’s focus today on the applications.

We've seen changes in the past around interfaces, application architectures, whether it was client-server, web, or moving toward services orientation. What is it now that organizations need to do to get their very necessary mission-critical information out to these mobile devices? Is this as easy or more difficult? How does it compare to the past?

McCarthy: The analogy that I draw, when I have discussions with clients now, is that it’s like being the captain of the Titanic, if you're the CIO. Everybody is focusing on those things that they see above the waterline -- how am I going to design these applications and how am I going to deliver them? There's this whole debate of whether I need to go native, hybrid, or browser-based.

But below the waterline is a huge broader part of the iceberg -- how am I going to manage these applications, how do I need to rethink my security architecture, is SOA really going to be enough for the level of integration that I need? The skill sets that I need as an IT shop are very different in this world?

We are working from a current research point of view that mobile and all these other things that are being bundled up with it that we just talked about are going to drive probably an order of magnitude bigger shift in IT and the CIO’s organization than the PC did 20 years ago.

It’s the PC shift on steroids that we are going to be looking at over the next three to five years as mobile completely enables companies to rethink their business processes, and that drives rethinking of their technology architectures, management, and skill sets underneath that.

The app store

Gardner: Sam Liu, we've seen an example, at least in the consumer space, of one way to start going at this applications delivery problem in order to get the full benefit and productivity of mobile devices and cloud delivery. Of course I'm talking about the app store. We've seen them in a handful of organizations and probably most prominently at Apple.

From your perspective, why does the app store model on the consumer side, what we've seen already, have applicability to the enterprise?

Liu: Dana, it’s setting the bar in terms of the user experience in the enterprise, the fact that people who are both consumers and employees of companies are essentially buying the devices, bringing them into the workplace, and forcing the issue onto IT.

You have the mobile professionals and power users of the company taking what they've experienced in the consumer role and requesting a similar experience in the enterprise. The challenge for IT is that this opens up a whole new can of worms for them in terms of policies, procedures, security, and control.

If you look back maybe 15, even 10 years ago, a mobile device was somewhat of a luxury, used by a few people in the company for primarily email. Most of the time, it was a BlackBerry device. We've gone from a singular device and a singular application environment to this perfect storm of a combination of a multitude of devices, platforms, and apps, popularized by the consumer world. That's a big challenge for IT.

Gardner: John, we've seen Apple take it to the desktop as well. They have an app store for their more modern desktop operating environment. Is this the solution, part of the solution? How confident are you that the app store is going to be an integral part of what the enterprise does vis-à-vis mobility?

McCarthy: Clearly the notion of an app store is an interface to this technology. The rate of change and the complexity of this environment basically says that I need more of a self-service module. I can’t go out there and hand-provision these applications like I did in the PC world.

The rate of change and the complexity of this environment basically says that I need more of a self-service module.

Because people have become so accustomed to this app store model, as Sam just pointed out, from a consumer adoption point of view, that user interface paradigm is going to continue over. I think what’s going to happen is that, behind the scenes, the enterprise app store functionality, from a management point of view, will be much richer over time, and that's where the divergence is going to be.

But as an interface and a way to get people the information and applications, there's one school of thought that says these app stores will replace the old intranet as the paradigm for not only getting apps, but actually subscribing to information.

Using technologies like Flipboard where you subscribe to the travel policy and you ultimately get the most updated version of that. That it’s going to evolve pretty dramatically from where we are today. It’s going to be the user interface paradigm to all this management capability that IT will use, but also these additional capabilities that the end-user -- whether that's customer, employee, or partner -- will access.

Mobile internet paradigm

Liu: I agree with John on the point about the app store becoming the sort of mobile intranet paradigm. Today, I'm not seeing any corporate intranet that work even halfway decent on a mobile device. So if you extend the concept of an app to content, information, anything that is relevant in a corporation, the app store paradigm is a very nice interface and a very effective delivery model for a mobile intranet, for that matter.

McCarthy: The other thing Sam is that, if you think about these apps, they're called apps, because they are not full-fledged applications. They're much simpler and task-oriented, so there's going to be more of them to manage. The app intensity of the organization is going to grow geometrically, as we start to unbundle these big complex systems like SAP and Office and provide them in more digestible and more segmented experiences. It’s no longer a one-size-fits-all world. The homogeneity of these applications and the PC as the end-user device is blowing apart as we speak.

Liu: Definitely agree.

Gardner: I think this aligns also very well with the methodological approach of services orientation. So with an SOA environment, for example, you would look for a registry or repository to list the apps and services that would be available, and those could either be ordered up by someone crafting a business process or directly by the end users.

Furthermore, to your point, John, about more granularity, we're seeing services and components that can be crafted into business processes, rather than those large hunking and brittle supported applications around enterprise resource planning (ERP) or some other big business activity. So we have a number of different levels in which app stores make sense.

Let’s move on now to how you get there. Is there an apps model or an app store model that we can look to? Let me start with you, Sam. You've had some experience here. What is it that people need to do? Should they build, buy, partner? How are you seeing it manifest in the market?

They're not going to be able to stop it, and so they're trying to figure out the right approach to dealing with all this multitude of devices and applications.

Liu: You're going to see a range of approaches. We've been talking to about a dozen or so enterprise IT organizations. The majority of them are in the early stages of trying to figure this out. They see the momentum coming. They're not going to be able to stop it, and so they're trying to figure out the right approach to dealing with all this multitude of devices and applications.

In most cases, they seem to be prompted by the influx of tablets and smartphones, but many of them are thinking beyond that. They're actually planning ahead. They're thinking about devices in general. It could be a mobile device or it could be even a desktop or a stationary endpoint. So they're looking beyond the immediate issues.

Our advice to them is, look, figure out your near term and long-term objectives, and then scope a pilot accordingly. Start with a clear definition of what you're trying to accomplish from a business standpoint, the objectives and the metrics, and then go about it that way. Identify the most pressing needs in terms of the users, apps, and devices and define your first project around that, so you can get a handle around what’s feasible and what’s not.

One of the challenges is that clearly the technology has changed a lot, but also just the lifecycle of hardware and software. It used to be anywhere between three to five years that IT could depend on. Now, you're looking at one year for changes of the devices, platforms, and new apps. That rate of change is also a big challenge for them.

Gardner: John, it seems that on the consumer side of app stores the goal is to move a lot of apps, charge for them, and make a lot of money. It seems to me that on the enterprise side, this is really more a function of control, of exerting policy, learning what apps are being used, by whom and how.

How do you see the difference between an app store in the consumer space that we're familiar with and how the requirements around that should perhaps be different in the enterprise?

Working in parallel

McCarthy: To go back to the question you asked Sam -- what’s happening and what’s been the catalyst for these different level of discussions -- there are two things happening in parallel.

People are moving out of the renegade pilot phase, and as Sam laid out, trying to take an architected approach. How do we holistically look at what our strategy is around mobile? Not just developing the apps, but how are we going to manage the apps? How are we going to manage the fact that different constituents, both internal and external, need different amounts of functionality and different amounts of security is driving it?

The other thing that we're seeing happening is, companies are now saying, "Oh my God, how am I going to manage the lifecycle of these apps? It’s relatively cheap and easy to build them, but how do I keep up with the endless releases that are going on and the operating system wars on these devices?" Apple and Google are doing four operating system releases a year that you need to manage to make sure your apps still runs.

Then there is the whole point, particularly in the customer-facing space, of how do I update my app so that it stays competitive, and we can really use that system of engagement with our customers to build that ongoing communication, which every company wants to get with their customers?

What we are seeing is that people are starting to look at how to manage the lifecycle of these apps and then, in parallel to that, I need to figure out what are my policies going to be and then how do I enforce or instantiate those policies That's where people are turning to these enterprise app stores from the vendors.

Then there is the whole point, particularly in the customer-facing space, of how do I update my app so that it stays competitive.

It's less of a selling and more of a management prerogative and design point. Then, of course, there is the complexity of the device environment.

Gardner: To that point Sam, do you see the app stores and enterprises also allowing for automated updates to go out? It really helps in the configuration, security, and patching types of issues, as well as upgrading the app over time. Also, to John’s point about policy enforcement, perhaps you could address what you're seeing in terms of updates, security, and management for the enterprise version of app stores?

Liu: The enterprise app store, is all about the app, how to procure and vet the app, so to ensure security and integrity, as well as distribute it to users, and controlling which users can have access to which apps. Also, it's enforcing policies, such as mandatory installs and updates of versions. Those are overall key elements of enterprise app store.

That said, it's not the end-all be-all. Enterprise app lifecycle management is much more than that. It's another issues, from tools to the actual hardware device controls, but certainly when it comes to apps and managing apps on mobile devices, mobile users, the enterprise app store is a big component of that.

Gardner: I wonder if there are some economic lessons here. It may be early on, but I'm wondering whether there is way to better manage application licenses, to be able to charge back on who is using apps, and when we have that policy and we have that data usage, apply a better economic model, so IT can be more transparent in terms of costs and benefits.

Sam, do you have any instances where folks have done this, and are there any monetary or business metrics of success that we can look to that say "We like app stores, because they're convenient, but can they help the bottom line as well?"

Other features

Liu: Some enterprise app stores don’t go beyond a basic app distribution and tracking, but in others you'll find features such as license management. Not all apps will be developed in-house. Some will actually even be purchased from third parties.

In a mobile world, you can expect to see more and more of that, only because, if nothing else, most IT organizations don’t have the system and the resources in-house for mobile devices and apps, so those tend to look outside to third parties for their solutions.

So in that situation, license management is an important part of enterprise app stores, so that IT can actually control just who has what license. If their job changes, we can bring it back and reallocate it to another user. Otherwise, you lose that cost that you paid for the app. Things like that should be built into enterprise app store.

You can also do bulk licensing. Most recently, you saw Apple’s program around bulk purchasing for businesses. Similarly, enterprise app stores will have some mechanism, when it's applicable, where companies can make bulk purchases and manage a pool of licenses across entire employee or contractor base.

Gardner: John, a similar question to you, do you see an economic benefit to this as well as a convenience and productivity benefit?

They have to go out to a third-party universe, because the value isn’t going to come from managing these things.

McCarthy: Initially it's going to be, "I need to manage these things." It's going to be knowing what's out there and making it easy for people to get at these things.

Sam made the point that this is much more of an ecosystem play. This notion where I am going to be developing everything myself isn’t going to work. There's going to be a lot of these third-party apps that the company, either on their own or through their services provider vets and says, "Here are all these other productivity apps that you can take advantage of. We have made sure that they work with our core business apps that we've developed."

But that focusing of what are limited IT resources is part of what's driving the app store phenomenon. IT doesn’t have time to build this themselves. They have to go out to a third-party universe, because the value isn’t going to come from managing these things. The value is going to come from these new customer or employee apps that allow us to rethink our business processes. We need to manage that complexity or we're going to have huge liabilities and huge risk and compliance issues.

Gardner: So Sam, it sounds as if the enterprise app store could also have a benefiting role when it comes to a hybrid model. Apps might originate with third parties, clouds, or SaaS providers. They might be developed in-house or even a combination thereof, and yet the user, the employee, would be able to access them in a singular fashion through a common interface and with a common policy and management. So is that the vision over time do you think with these app stores?

Liu: Absolutely. It's even a vision now. It shouldn’t matter, especially to the employee or the user, where the apps come from or who built it. It's all about the experience.

Also, in some ways it shouldn’t matter what device they're coming in from, whether it's a smartphone, an iPad, laptop, or desktop. There should be a similar rich user experience that’s appropriate for that particular form factor. So you abstract these hows and whats from a user standpoint. It becomes a more user-friendly and more productive environment for the user.

Gardner: We will have to begin closing out, but let's get a quick look to the future. John, any thoughts about either other trends or influences that will be encouraging organizations to examine and consider the app store model for their own application lifecycle management?

Reinventing the process

McCarthy: I think we are going to see more and more of these apps driving the reinvention of business processes. The reliance on these apps is only going to explode over the next three to five years. So we need a way, as we have talked about, where it's easy to find those apps, but also it's easy to manage those apps.

It's serving both sides, serving the needs of the businessperson or the customer, but also serving the requirements of the organization to allow us to harness this, but minimize the cost of managing these devices, making sure that they are secure, that we are not doing stuff with consumer data that’s going to get us into trouble. This is part of the whole rethinking of management and security in a world where it's much more mobile and much more outside the firewall.

Gardner: Same question to you, Sam, about the future. I wonder whether enterprises will be creating app stores for their employees, but could also start creating apps that they could sell in terms of limited access to certain data or certain functionality. In a sense they could create new revenue, new business models, that would reach mass market. Any thoughts about the future for how businesses use app stores, not just internally, but as a business channel?

Liu: Actually we've run into a few enterprises already thinking in that mode. Initially when we talk to IT, they're thinking about the internal issues, especially about controlling management policies, but they're also being asked to build systems that are customer-facing, and in some cases systems that deliver and sell products to customers. So, where it applies, such as software and apps, they're looking at how to use the same paradigm for delivery of app services and apps to end customers.

So it's potentially a new channel and a new revenue model for companies, not just simply a cost issue of trying to manage and control.

This is part of the whole rethinking of management and security in a world where it's much more mobile and much more outside the firewall.

McCarthy: And there are all of those businesses that are going to emerge where people talk about data exhausts. We know what people are doing. The app store becomes a way for people to tap into that and you can start to monetize that.

Gardner: And it strikes me that there shouldn’t be any reason that the same infrastructure that supports an internal app store wouldn’t also support an external one.

Liu: No, it's very similar.

Gardner: I'm afraid we are about out of time, Sam, is there a place folks can go for more information? I understand you have a white paper available. Where would people go to get more information on this enterprise app store and the management of mobility as a result?

Liu: We have a white paper that’s freely available as a download on our website, www.partnerpedia.com.

Gardner: And John, any research reports or notes that are available on this subject from Forrester?

McCarthy: There are a number of reports that we've done outlining kind of the future of mobile management. People can come to forrester.com and search the site and they'll find the stuff that myself and a number of colleagues have written relative to this topic.

Gardner: You've been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on how enterprise app stores are part of the equation for better mobile management and related mobile work success. I want to thank our guests. We've been here with John McCarthy, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. Thanks so much, John.

McCarthy: Thanks very much, Dana.

Gardner: We've also been here with Sam Liu, Vice President of Marketing at Partnerpedia. Thank you, Sam.

Liu: Thanks, Dana, and thanks, John.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

For a free white papers on enterprise app stores and mobile management, go to www.forrester.com or www.partnerpedia.com.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Partnerpedia.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on the emerging concept of enterprise app stores based on the popular consumer model. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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Enterprise App Store Trends Point to Need for Better Applications Marketplace for ISVs, Service Providers, Mobile Business Ecosystems

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on the development of enterprise app stores and application marketplaces for ISVs to extend and modernize the applications delivery model to better serve employees, customers, and partners.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Request an app marketplace demo. Sponsor: Partnerpedia.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on the fast moving trends supporting the escalating demand for enterprise app stores. As enterprises and most business users have rapidly adopted smartphones and made them mission critical to their work and lives, tablets are fast on their heels as a similar major disruptor.

RIM, Apple’s iOS, and Google Android devices are rapidly changing the way the world does business ... and does software. Riding along on the mobile device wave is the complimentary App Store model pioneered by Apple. The App Store is rapidly gaining admiring adopters from many quarters, thanks to its promise of reducing cost of distribution and of updates, and also of creating whole new revenue streams and even deeper user relationships.

Those seeking to make application store benefits their own -- and fast, before someone else does -- come from a diverse lot. They include vendors, service providers, and communication service providers. Interestingly, though, it’s the users that have shown the way to adoption by demonstrating a comfort, a willingness, and an affinity for a self-selection process for downloadable mobile (and increasingly enterprise) applications and services.

The users are really quite happy with paying for what they have on the spot, as long as that process is quick, seamless, and convenient. So the onus is now on a variety of business service providers and enterprises to come up with some answers for app stores of their own and to serve their employees, customers, and partner ecosystems in new ways.

This can't be done haphazardly. The new app stores also must stand up to the rigors of business-to-business (B2B) commerce requirements, not just consumer-driven games.

So to learn more about how the enterprise app store market will shape up, I'm here with a panel to delve into the market and opportunity for enterprise app stores, and to find out how they could be created quickly and efficiently to strike, as it were, while the app store iron is hot.

Please join me now in welcoming our guests. We're here with Michele Pelino, a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. Welcome, Michele.

Michele Pelino: Hi, how are you?

Gardner: I'm great. We are also here with Mark Sochan, the CEO of Partnerpedia. Hi, Mark.

Mark Sochan: Hi, Dana.

Gardner: And we're here also with Sam Liu, Vice President of Marketing at Partnerpedia. Hi there, Sam.

Sam Liu: How are you doing, Dana?

Gardner: I'm great. Michele, let's go to you first. This whole applications marketplace concept is something we hadn’t even thought of perhaps two or three years ago, and it's moving very rapidly. The trend is also happening across categories.

Usually we can sort of slice and dice these things, but we are looking at consumer, business, enterprise, and service providers seeking app stores. Maybe you could sort of paint a picture for what's going on with business applications, now that we have seen the app store model really pick up and become attractive to consumers.

Importance of mobility

Pelino: In order to provide some context around the momentum that we're seeing on the app store side of the world, it’s really important to take a step back and recognize how important mobility has become to enterprises overall, as they are interacting with their employees and their customers and their partners and providers as well.

We do surveys at Forrester of enterprises in both North America and Europe to better understand those priorities and how mobility fits into overall technology initiatives. We find that three of the top priorities that are being focused on by many enterprises are related to mobility.

That includes deploying new devices to their employees. It includes supporting more types of applications for not just the employees that are working outside of the office and the road warriors that we all think about when we are thinking about mobile workers, but also expanding applications for workers who are actually in the office.

So this broadening of mobility includes many types of workers and applications that address not just the traditional email/calendaring applications, which are widely deployed by most companies, but is also pushing those applications down into line of business worker types of applications, which are tied to particular types of employees in an organization.

They're applications that may be designed for the sales team, customer service, support, or marketing. They also might be applications that are tied to the needs of particular vertical industry’s logistics or supply chain management or enterprise asset management types of applications.

Many firms are broadening the types of applications that they're deploying to their customers, partners, and suppliers, as well as to their employees.

All of these applications are where we're seeing the momentum today. Ultimately, many firms are broadening the types of applications that they're deploying to their customers, partners, and suppliers, as well as to their employees, and this momentum is continuing.

The other thing that’s driving some of this momentum is that individuals, not just employees, are going out and buying lots of different smartphone devices and mobile devices. You touched on that in your earlier comments around tablets, slates, and different types of smartphones that are out there. So, this momentum isn’t just happening within the corporation. It’s actually happening outside of that, and it's what we would call the consumerization of IT.

This means that many individuals, consumers, are driving requirements into the corporation and into the IT organization to get new types of applications on their devices, whether those devices are personally owned or ones that the corporation has as well.

This consumerization trend is also happening to drive these requirements into the organization and to really generate more momentum around applications in general as well as smartphone devices, tablets, and other types of mobile devices.

Gardner: So we have the consumers, the users, very much aligned with this trend. They seem to have adapted to it rather easily. We've also seen an ecosystem of independent software vendors (ISVs) involved, where they see opportunities to create direct relationships or marketplaces and get new revenue. We've even seen some companies like Zynga and some of the other gaming corporations, taking off based on this apps model.

What's the last leg on the stool? It seems to me that their will be new types of app store providers. Michele, for those organizations thinking of doing this, what do they need to consider? What's important from a B2B perspective of doing an app store?

A lot of momentum

Pelino: One of the things to think about, when you are doing an app store, is to recognize that there's a lot of momentum around app stores in general and that came from the initial foray that we had seen from the device manufacturers like Apple and RIM. All the different device manufacturers have application stores tied initially to a consumer-oriented perspective.

The momentum around those app stores has driven corporations to start thinking about what they can do to more effectively and efficiently support their requirements around applications.

The thing with corporations is that IT organizations still want to control which version of the applications are in there and what types of apps an employee might have access to in a corporate environment, as opposed to what they might be doing in their personal world. Security is always a key issue here.

All of these things are really driving the need for these application stores -- but at an enterprise level. More and more applications are not just coming from what the IT organization wants to put out there, but also line-of-business workers within the organization are driving more and more application requirements.

By implementing these application stores, I, as an individual employee with a particular role will have access to certain applications. Another employee may have access to other applications that are tied to their role in the organization. And you could broaden that concept out to interacting with partners, suppliers, and customers as well.

The IT group is getting pushed by the end users and organizations that have become very comfortable with how they can search, browse, try, download, and purchase applications.

That’s where this momentum for application stores is coming from. It's not just coming from the IT organization, but it’s coming from line of business workers who want to have applications out there for their customers, employees, and partners.

Gardner: Mark Sochan at Partnerpedia, there's a need now for an IT department or an enterprise organization to take advantage of this trend, but to do it in a way that’s amenable to them, that suits their requirements. Is this a big opportunity for IT to do something differently but perhaps even do something better than the way they have distributed software in the past?

Sochan: Absolutely, Dana. Adding to some of the comments that Michele made about IT consumerization, there is no doubt that the IT group is getting pushed by the end users and organizations that have become very comfortable with how they can search, browse, try, download, and purchase applications. As a result, that has raised the expectations of how those same workers would like to be able browse, search, and download applications that could help them in their business world and with their productivity.

But, there are some pretty big differences between the consumer world of buying a 99-cent Angry Birds game versus downloading business applications. So some of the things that IT groups are having to think about and sort out are security and data governance, and how data that is specific to the device can be managed and, if need be, removed.

There are also issues about how the IT group can enable worker productivity and increase the satisfaction of the user base. [Request an app marketplace demo.]

Savings and efficiencies

Finally, there's a need to try and find cost savings and efficiencies. If you had everyone just buying individual applications, then you wouldn’t have the benefit of bulk license purchasing or the ability to purchase through normal corporate buying processes that result in larger scales of economy.

Gardner: Michele, back to you. I know this is still early and this is a very fast-moving and dynamic marketplace, but do we have any sense of how big this is going to be? Not necessarily numbers, but do you think that most enterprises are going to want to adopt this sort of a model?

Also, this all reminds me of a couple of years ago, when we talked in services oriented architecture (SOA) terms about registry and repository, making a list items of services and/or applications, and then users could pick and choose and start beginning to make processes from them. Is this something that you at Forrester expect to be pervasive or is this going to be on the fringe?

Pelino: This is the beginning of a pretty key momentum driver in this area. What we're seeing now is that some of these key drivers, are coming together for large, medium, small enterprises who must figure out how to expand their applications and capabilities. What we're seeing now is that some of these key drivers are coming together for large, medium, small enterprises who must figure out how to expand their applications and capabilities.

Also, as Mark said, you still have to have some control over this. You have to deal with corporate requirements around purchasing and all of the requirements internally as well. All of those factors are coming together.

About 30 percent of enterprises are using application stores do deploy some of their applications at some level.

Our surveys say that about 30 percent of enterprises -- that’s medium, large, as well as small enterprises -- are using app stores do deploy some of their applications at some level. It’s not that they're doing everything that way today. That’s the early stage of this, because this is an evolutionary path. It started on the consumer side and now it’s going into the enterprise.

As I think about what our survey data would say going into 2011, I have a feeling that, that percentage will jump pretty dramatically. More enterprises are dealing with that pain-point of the complexity of getting these applications out there, of having to have some control over which version, monitoring them, tracking what's going on with the apps, ensuring that everybody is getting the application that they should ... or not.

Those kinds of things are very important, certainly at a corporate level, and so this is driving a lot of that momentum as well, and security can't be lost in that picture either.

Gardner: Sam Liu at Partnerpedia, how do we help enterprises step into this? Is there a path? Is there some methodology, or track record involved? If I were an IT manager, I am thinking, okay, I have to build, I have to buy, or I have to partner -- or some combination to get an app store up and running.

If I have an app store that’s serving my employees, the chances are that I'm going to need to have one that’s going to be able to stand up to the rigors of delivering apps and services and business value out to my customer end-users as well.

How does an organization like an enterprise, a vendor, or a communication service provider start the process of thinking about architecting and providing an app store?

Early stages

Liu: We've talked to a number of different enterprises and various industries, and most of them are in the early stages of researching and trying to figure out what this means to them. They know that tablets are coming, but actually today’s problems have as much to do with just devices already in-house, such as smartphones.

What we're hearing in terms of platforms is that the top three platforms they're trying to figure out are iOS, Android, and the platform coming from RIM.

In that research phase, some of the issues that they're concerned about are more traditional IT policies and compliance issues. They understand the motivation from the user standpoint and the value of that, but they're really trying to understand the landscape in terms of those more traditional issues around IT control and compliance, such as security.

The other thing is that they're also more open to outsourced or cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based solutions, as opposed to something that may be completely managed in-house via traditional software. The issue there is that they want to make sure that it actually can connect to the very secure session in the corporate environment, and that by outsourcing they are not giving that up in terms of the security and control.

What we recommend is to start with a scoped project. Don’t try to solve all of your problems at once. Figure out what you need today and build up a roadmap for how you want to get there tomorrow. So you might want to start with the current devices, such as phones and focus on maybe internal applications or select third-party applications. Deploy a project from that and then figure out how you want to evolve that towards other devices and other platforms. [Request an app marketplace demo.].

They're looking for some blended model between complete end-user autonomy and some better corporate control.

Gardner: Mark Sochan, this isn't just about the technology of being able to serve up an application. This is also about billing, invoicing, the money trail, and then making that auditable. In certain industries, it’s a bit more of an integration issue.

How do you walk into an enterprise or a vendor and help them sort through, not just the delivery of these apps, but also the management of the charge-backs and/or processing of credit cards or other means of billing?

Sochan: At Partnerpedia we've been working with a number of the leading tablet vendors and some of the largest enterprise customers to understand what are the business problems and what are the priorities that need to be solved.

Overwhelmingly, what we're hearing is that most customers are not satisfied with just having an open marketplace that you might see from, say, the Google Apps Marketplace. They're looking for some blended model between complete end-user autonomy and some better corporate control. That’s the first piece of feedback we are hearing.

The second piece is that there is a need to have some sort of branding. Most enterprise companies want to have some branding, so that it’s very clear to their users that this is their marketplace, this is their store. And that store has a combination of third-party built applications, similar to what you might see if you went into an Apple App Store or into the Google Android marketplace.

Custom built

But, you also see applications that have been custom built specifically for that corporation. That is, bite-size pieces of applications and business process productivity that is specific to a person’s role in that organization. Plus, some higher-end applications are coming from some of their business partners.

Because there are a variety of different sources of these applications, there are different business models that need to be addressed. The one that may be most familiar to all of us would be the ones that are the similar kinds of applications that we might find in the Apple App Store or the productivity type things, whether it’s news and information or time management or calendaring.

Then, as we move to the custom-built applications or the in-house applications, it’s also important to be able to have a way to side-load those applications and make sure that those applications are available and discoverable by the people in the organization that they are relevant to.

There's a whole idea of personalization that goes far beyond what we've seen on the consumer side, where basically everyone is presented a very similar experience in the enterprise side.

It’s very important to personalize much further to a marketing executive, for example. That’s going to be a very different set of applications that have been pre-approved and that are relevant to that marketing executive, versus someone who is on the production floor.

There's a need to have a lot of control and flexibility for the corporation to either pre-purchase those licenses and to manage those licenses effectively.

Finally, depending on the type of application and the user, there's a need to have a lot of control and flexibility for the corporation to either pre-purchase those licenses and to manage those licenses effectively. Then, they can both purchase and manage the distribution of those license, and be able to reclaim them as employees leave the organization or devices are lost, as well as allowing, as appropriate flexibility for the end-users to actually make purchases directly based on their budget. [Request an app marketplace demo.]

Gardner: Michele Pelino with Forrester Research, I don’t know if this is a bit outside of your field, but it seems to me that that from an IT procurement perspective we have been talking about smartphones and tablets.

When you think about the app store model as a way to distribute and manage applications to all devices -- including PCs -- you can start to get better efficiencies over licensing. You can really meter who gets applications and how often they're used and use that to decide what apps to keep or what to throw out. You can also have a better means of updating and adding security patches in a way that’s automated and centralized, rather than going from point to point.

Do have any thoughts about the IT efficiency aspects of an app store model, if we take it beyond smartphones and tablets to the entire endpoints the users use?

Evolving over time

Pelino: That is how this could evolve over time. We've been starting on the mobile device side of the world -- smartphones and tablets, those types of devices. But, at a corporate level, there are other types of endpoints that you need to manage and deploy applications to, and you want the same kind of control. You also want to have a sense of how much you are spending.

Sam mentioned, as a service type of delivery model or a per user type of delivery model, you can use different kinds of models here to keep control of the cost and have efficiencies around cost that you might not have today, because there is lots of overlap happening.

There are benefits as well, when you're thinking about individual end users who might have devices that they use in certain situations. When they're at their desk, maybe they have their laptops or desktops there. So, ultimately, you could have the same environment to integrate what an individual end-user or an employee could get in terms of the apps that they're able to get and always have a consistent experience for that.

The other side of that is just having a recognition that at the IT level, as much as they would love to control this, there are lots of devices around the bend. So even in the mobile world the devices we see today are not the ones that are going to be here tomorrow and there is more and more, almost on a day-to-day basis, being announced and put out there for end-users, whether it be enterprises or consumers to use.

How do I keep that in line? This app-store model is certainly one way to do it. But, when you think about it at the IT organization level, it’s not just about mobility. They have to think about the endpoints across the organization and this could certainly be relevant in that case as well.

The ability to create a very rich catalog of information makes it much more compelling and gains a lot more commitment from your partners.

Gardner: Mark, we're hearing about the benefits for an internal app store where IT, for example, might get better software distribution benefits. I know that Partnerpedia has been working with a number of early adopters on storefronts and branding around app stores. Are you finding that there is a capability here that you can, in effect, create the same app store for internal distribution as well as external, where you would be taking apps and services out to a wider audience, be it B2B or business-to-consumer (B2C)? [Request an app marketplace demo.]

Sochan: Absolutely. If you look at the core essence of an app store, there is a repository or catalog of information that makes it very easy for a company’s customers be able to find, browse, and look for products and services, not only from the vendor, but also related products and services that are of value from that vendor's ecosystem.

It almost doesn’t matter what kind of company it is. Most companies have some extended ecosystem of value-added partners. The ability to create a very rich catalog of information that your customers can browse and search and look for related products and services makes it much more compelling and gains a lot more commitment from your partners.

Because you're now providing them with of a go-to-market benefit directly to the customers, and from the customer’s perspective, they see tremendous value in your company’s products and services, because they see the richness of the ecosystem around it.

At the heart of it is this catalog that can be highly personalized. You can imagine that if you're now able to personalize this for your customers, where your customers are coming into this marketplace and they are not just seeing a generic marketplace, they are actually seeing a marketplace that’s been personalized to them.

Marketplace knows

This means that the marketplace already knows which products your customers have purchased from you and therefore is making a pre-selection or presenting them with information that’s very specific and related to the footprint that, that customer already has of your products.

In some cases, in a more consumer-oriented world, you may want to actually go to a transaction and actually enable purchasing. But, our enterprise customers are telling us that, equally important, if not more important, in the first steps is to have a very sophisticated lead capture engine, so that you can capture that interest that your customer has expressed, and been browsing and expressed interest in a particular product.

Then, you can route that, as appropriate, into whatever customer relationship management (CRM) system is being used and more effectively follow up with that customer, either with your own direct sales force or with passing that lead to your partners for the appropriate follow up.

Gardner: This is interesting. App stores in the enterprise seem to be the gift that keeps giving. We have distribution benefits, but now we are looking at some marketing and business intelligence (BI) benefit, where we can segment and provide a different façade or set of applications and services to different constituencies, know who they are, create a relationship, gather metadata about their activities, and then better serve them with the next round.

Back to you, Michele. Is there a marketing and a BI benefit through the app store model that allows for an efficiency in gathering information and delivering products and services significantly better than some of the past models, where these have all been in sort of similar silos and it has been difficult to integrate and pull them together?

As you have all of your customers, partners, and suppliers accessing these application stores, as well as your employees, you can then target those individuals with appropriate information.

Pelino: You can imagine that now, with the capabilities that you have, you're going to be able to track and understand better what individuals are doing. Are they using certain applications? What they are doing? When they are doing it? As well as better understanding how you might be able to package and put together capabilities that might be more valuable to your customers in a manner that will be useful, in an individualized manner, not just basic bundles or combinations of services.

From the BI side of this, we've only started scraping the surface, because we are in the earlier stages. But as you have all of your customers, partners, and suppliers accessing these application stores, as well as your employees, you can then target those individuals with appropriate information. Not necessarily marketing all the time, but appropriate information, if it’s for employees and partners and suppliers, and for the customers, certainly marketing and promotional activities could be tied in here as well.

Gardner: It sounds very good in theory. Mark, tell us a little bit about some of the ways that this is actually being used now. I know you can’t always tell us the names of the folks you're working with, because you are an OEM supplier and they may still be in pilot in terms of their own app stores, but how are these ideas really coming into fruition? What’s really going on on the street? Some use cases for this enterprise app store concept?

Sochan: What’s happening on the street is that a number of tablet vendors are seeing that having a branded app store capability around their tablets is a critical checkbox item to creating a whole product that is valuable to the enterprise. That’s the first thing that we see happening through our direct relationships with our vendors and customers.

The second thing is that the enterprise customers and consumers of these tablets are looking and starting pilots right now, where they're setting up their own branded app store to make it easier for their internal users to be able to browse and find and demo'd applications and these pilots are starting now. [Request an app marketplace demo.]

Gardner: Do you have any metrics of success? Are we too soon into this? Have you got any users that have put some of this into practice and said, "We did blank and then we got blank in return. There was a percent increase in this or a decrease in that?" Do we have any metrics that demonstrate what the payoffs from doing this are?

Trove of data

Sochan: As Michele motioned, there is a really exciting rich trove of data and BI that you get, because now you can see what users are interested in. You see what they are browsing.

All of us are very familiar with the Amazon-like model, where you rate products and services. The exact same thing is now enabled in these branded app stores, where the users are in real time rating the number of stars for that application. More importantly, they are giving their comments about what they found useful and areas that they would like to see improvements, which creates this very exciting innovation cycle.

Where previously you had very complex monolithic applications that got delivered and had a couple of year cycle, now you're seeing bite-size pieces of innovation that gets immediate feedback from the end-users. The developer sees that feedback almost instantly and is able to immediately respond with either bug fixes or feature enhancements.

What’s really exciting to me is just how fast the innovation and that feedback loop happens that just spurs more innovation.

Gardner: Before we wrap up, maybe we could step out a little bit into the future and think about some of the implications for this.

It's bringing up the value of the information into making better business decisions, and that business intelligence I think should not be underestimated.

Michele, how far do you think this can go? We've talked about how it could come back and affect the PCs. I am thinking that it really could change the way businesses operate in terms of their revenue, relationships with their customers, central repository and means of managing both marketing and innovation and then distribution.

Pelino: If you think about the evolution of where this could head, you're starting with the central piece of the value proposition to many of these mobile devices and tablets, which is the application, and that’s absolutely critical.

You're going to be proving out the value of the applications in these app stores. But, benefits that can be achieved are efficiencies around cost. You've got benefits around having all this information about your customers, your partners, your suppliers, your employees, or anybody interfacing with these application stores -- depending on how you're implementing them -- that you can now use to leverage and broaden out your relationships with them at various levels.

This is absolutely critical. It's bringing up the value of the information into making better business decisions, and that business intelligence I think should not be underestimated. The other side of it is, when you think about the complexities that are facing the IT organization at a real tangible level, that’s not going to go away.

As we look to the future, the complexities around these devices, around the tablets, the slates, the smartphones, the other devices that are the more traditional devices and endpoints that companies have to manage and deal with, that complexity is going to continue.

Managing complexity

When you think about where this can head, recognizing that companies are going to be looking for more efficient ways to manage that complexity, these application stores are one way to do that, and they provide a pretty cost effective way potentially, because, as Sam mentioned earlier, some of these are dealt with as a service, per user basis, per use basis, and so there is efficiencies around this that you can’t underestimate either.

Gardner: You almost want to throw another acronym out there, which would be something like "business services as a service."

Pelino: That’s not a bad idea. But, as you think of the future, there are a lot of opportunities to really build this out and have a critical impact on the strategic initiatives of the organization. It may not be just a tactical thing that the IT organization is implementing. It’s a very strategic potential for an organization to implement these stores.

Gardner: Mark Sochan, are you talking at that executive level with some of your customers? First, maybe you ought to quickly summarize what it is that the Partnerpedia is delivering to the market and then follow on with are you selling this to IT people or to strategic thinkers who are really looking at this as a business strategy.

Sochan: The core of the Partnerpedia offering is a white label, cloud-based, branded app store, that allows very efficient discovery and delivery of applications. The internal benefits for the internal facing app store is the capability for IT members to be able to pre-purchase select applications that they want their users have available to them. And also providing the capability to brand that app store so that it follows the company’s logo and it has a very consistent corporate look and feel.

The internal benefits for the internal facing app store is the capability for IT members to be able to pre-purchase select applications that they want their users have available to them.

Then, giving a way for users to be able to very easily search, browse, and look for applications that are specific to their role in the organization.

Finally, the license management of that software, allowing the IT department to be able to track licenses that have been purchased and downloaded, as well as be able to reclaim those licenses as is appropriate, when an employee either no longer needs that license or has left the organization or has lost the device.

And looking more to the future, we are also working very closely with customers that are building a private branded marketplace. And I distinguish between an app store and a marketplace in that a marketplace is much broader than just applications. It can be hard goods, products, services, or offerings from partners and provides just a much richer way for customers to discover value-added offerings from a company. [Request an app marketplace demo.]

Gardner: Who are the folks who seem to be most interested in this? Is this something you're selling at multiple levels, or do you really have the ears yet of that business strategy?

Sochan: We're seeing it in a few different industries. Certainly high-tech is an area where this lends itself very well, because most companies are moving to a cloud services world and so they're looking for new and more innovative ways to combine and recombine multiple solution offerings to come up with more valuable offerings to their customers.

Driving opportunities

This is also driving opportunities for innovation and business models. how the customer pays for it. Having these bite-size pieces of innovation lends itself to new ideas and new business models in which there can be not only just actual new sources of revenue that can come out of this, because now it’s a channel to the market.

Gardner: Michele, are there any resources at Forrester that you could point people to, if they wanted to explore this a bit more? Are there some reports, some URLs, any place that you would suggest people go to at Forrester to learn more?

Pelino: As I was talking I was referencing a few points of data from various reports that might be relevant, and you can get to those links through the Forrester site.

There's one report that sets up the complexity that’s facing many organizations that I touched on very early on, called "Managing Mobile Complexity."

There's another report that’s coming out very soon around mobility in the cloud. We've been talking about these delivery mechanisms, cloud-based delivery mechanisms for applications and services, especially around mobile devices and applications and services.

Having these bite-size pieces of innovation lends itself to new ideas and new business models.

Gardner: Mark Sochan at Partnerpedia, are there some reports, resources, white papers, ways in which people can learn more about your approach to the market and this notion of the white label in the cloud app store as a service?

Sochan: We have some great white papers that people can access from our website at partnerpedia.com, that will give very useful insights into some of the best leading practices in this area.

Gardner: You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast discussion on the fast moving trend supporting the escalating demand for enterprise app stores.

I'd like to thanks our guests, Michele Pelino, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. Thanks, Michele.

Pelino: Thanks so much.

Gardner: And Mark Sochan, CEO at Partnerpedia. Thank you, Mark.

Sochan: My pleasure.

Gardner: And also Sam Liu, Vice President of Marketing at Partnerpedia. Thanks, Sam.

Liu: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks again for listening and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Request an app marketplace demo. Sponsor: Partnerpedia.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on the development of enterprise app stores and application marketplaces for ISVs to extend and modernize the applications delivery model to better serve employees, customers, and partners. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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