Gazing into the Mobile Crystal Ball to Learn Predictions for the Enterprise in the Year Ahead

Across the mobile enterprise, 2015 shows no signs of slowing down. According to research firm Ovum, enterprise mobility is set to be at the top of the CIO agenda in the year ahead. We confirmed this in our own research, as more than 69 percent of respondents in a recent survey of Red Hat customers indicated that mobility would be a key IT initiative for 2015. 

Based on what we’ve seen firsthand and in the market, this is certainly true – organizations are set to get even more serious about mobile in the coming months. We can expect to see a variety of developments across the mobile enterprise, including the below:  

As mobility matures and continues to be high priority for enterprises, mobile app projects are increasing in both number and complexity. As enterprises roll out suites of apps, many of them will want to access back-end systems in an efficient, secure and centralized manner. To support this, app development in 2015 will likely see the increased adoption of microservices and API-based approaches. By spinning up standalone discoverable microservices, different mobile projects can share and reuse these services. This in turn acts as a catalyst for more team-based and collaborative app development. 

Because enterprise app projects typically demand a variety of developer skills, such as UI, front-end coding, back-end integration, analytics, administration, and more, microservices approaches are also driving the need for greater levels of access control. 

By giving developers access to only the developer components necessary to their role, and making these easily discoverable and reusable, development time shrinks and apps can be brought to market faster. 

We will see the adoption of a bimodal IT approach 

Last year, we continued to see increased adoption of agile approaches in development and DevOps areas. In the year ahead, agility will remain a focus, but IT organizations will try to find a balance between both agile and traditional IT practices, giving the right mix of stability and speed. 

The need to accelerate mobile projects will drive the emergence of more tools to support agile developer and DevOps approaches, but this does not eliminate the need to maintain and manage existing legacy systems and to provide for resilience and continuity in critical areas such as security, infrastructure, and governance. Effective collaboration between both agile IT and traditional IT will help shape mobile success. 

Appetite for application services will grow

Organizations that have largely focused on piecemeal aspects of mobility, such as MDM, analytics, one-off tactical apps, or point solutions, will shift their focus to the underlying architectures that support agility and the continuity of mobile projects. This will not only have an impact on the appetite for open, cloud-based mobile application platforms, but will also lead to the creation of a broader set of enterprise services as traditional middleware and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) combine to create a true application platform “as-a-Service” that can run across the public cloud, private cloud, and the on-premises data center. 

Overall, team-based collaboration with more granular access control will gain traction in the year ahead. This will mean greater efficiency, visibility and security controls across mobile projects throughout the stages of their development lifecycle. We also expect to see agile development activity increase. No doubt, the mobile year ahead will be eventful.