Oracle paves way for firms seeking enterprise mobility

US-based Oracle has introduced the Mobile Application Framework (MAF) to assist businesses in achieving enterprise mobility.

Chin Ying Loong, Oracle Asia Pacific’s vice president for Asean Fusion Middleware Sales, said that according to International Data Corp, the world’s mobile workforce would reach 1.3 billion by the end of next year, representing 37.2 per cent of the overall workforce. 

As business demands increase and the workforce becomes more mobile, the need for organisations to ensure employees are connected anywhere, anytime via any device to enterprise applications has become important – and has led to a surge in the development of enterprise mobile applications, he said. 

Also, recent Oracle research revealed that younger business workers were far more likely to find a way to access work data and applications on their mobile device – with or without their employer’s consent – with 71 per cent of workers aged 16-24 using work applications on personal mobile devices, highlighting the need for organisations to secure their business from the device right through to the data centre.

Loong said the key success factors for enterprises when implementing mobile solutions included having a mobile roadmap and a ‘mobile first’ mindset. A well thought-out roadmap can, however, help prioritise their portfolio.

“The trick for organisations today is to implement their own end-to-end mobile platforms, and to keep things simple. Simplicity is crucial to the rapid and effective integration of business data with user-friendly mobile applications. The cloud in particular offers businesses an excellent back-end platform to support their mobility solutions in a simple and cost effective manner,” he said.

The technology needed to fuel the mobile business is here, and the appetite among people in the workforce for everything mobile is only getting more voracious, he added.

The executive said Oracle’s MAF now provided such a platform where developers can rapidly develop single-source applications and deploy across multiple operating systems. 

A multichannel mobile-application development platform refers to a set of tools to build mobile apps that can meet the demands of today’s connected world, where users can interact with the business from various touch points and devices such as tablet at home, mobile phone on the move, and laptop at work, he explained.

Due to the proliferation of mobile devices with different operating systems – including Android, iOS, Windows and Blackberry – there is a need for a mobile development platform that is able to cover all devices and operating systems efficiently and effectively without having to maintain multiple versions and code bases, he stressed.

MAF provides what he described as “a visual and declarative development experience” and leverages on Java, HTML5 and Javascript, which are industry standards for application development and do not require learning another proprietary development language. 

“Applications developed using Oracle MAF provide a consistent and optimised user experience, as it will detect the device form factor and render the user interface to suit the device’s layout,” said Loong. 

When developing a mobile app, enterprises need to adapt the application to make it more tolerant of the mobile device, the executive said, adding that a step further would be to weave in a responsive design that makes the app mobile-friendly – either providing a different application flow or even providing different types of information to the mobile user.

“There’s no looking back with mobile. It is changing the way we communicate forever, and it can change the way business is conducted for our future generations. The way forward is for enterprises to embrace the mobile revolution responsibly to deliver engaging user experiences on secure platforms, for any application, on any device and around any data,” said Loong.