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November - 2014 - issue > Company of the Month
MobileForceSoftwareDriving the Paradigm Shift in Enterprise Mobility
Kamalika Roy Chowdhury
Monday, December 1, 2014
According to industry experts, enterprise mobility is a disruptive force that many organizations are dealing with, and this trend is expected to continue and grow in the foreseeable future. Increasing demands from business units are putting additional pressures on IT organizations to deliver an ever larger number of mobile applications, and dev teams are struggling to keep up. Traditional lengthy and expensive development cycles, with protracted time to value, are no longer sustainable. Teams will be forced to employ practices that are different from traditional application development. It is estimated that by 2018, more than half of all mobile apps will be created by business analysts using codeless tools (Source: Adopt a Bimodal Approach to Mobile App Development Strategy, Gartner, July 2014).
MobileForce Software, Inc. (www.mobileforcesoftware.com), based in Sunnyvale, CA. is an innovative software company developing solutions to capitalize on the mobile app explosion. MobileForce Software is an industry leader in providing cloud-based solutions to help companies rapidly configure secure, scalable, native mobile apps that integrate with on-premise as well as cloud-based enterprise applications. F500 customers include Cisco, Intel, HP, Mass Mutual, and CenturyLink. The MobileForce Unification Engine offers a unified view of critical corporate information across PC, tablets and mobile devices without any coding, empowering users to consume and update relevant data to succeed in any context - whether in an elevator, a coffee shop or a formal presentation. Companies such as Cisco, Intel, Century Link and Cepheid use MobileForce solutions to drive productivity and efficiency gains by connecting people with relevant information - anywhere, anytime - resulting in substantial ROI benefits.

According to Jagadish Bandhole, Founder & CEO of MobileForce Software: "This true no coding solution can be used by business users to rapidly assemble and configure stunning mobile app user experiences - without compromise - and reduce time to market by 75%. These apps have resulted in double-digit percentage productivity gains within 100 days of deployment".This notable transformation has proved to be a true disruption within this space as opposed to the traditional norm of coding which was making the process expensive and take a lot of time.

MobileForce Viewpoint
One of the initial challenges that MobileForce faced was to bring all the corporate data and applications securely under one roof, talking to each other via defined work flows, and make them accessible anywhere and anytime. Having said that, some of the key prerequisites still needed to be taken into consideration, in order to combat those aforementioned challenges. These obstacles were identified as Security, User Experience and Analytics.

From a security standpoint, it was important to implement access controls to secure the data - in motion and at rest - as well as control read/write access based on the login ID and role of a given user. Support for OAuth, SAML2, AD/LDAP authentication standards, SSL, and PKI encryption was also important.

From a user experience perspective, many traditional enterprise applications are poorly optimized for mobile and smaller form factors. Additionally, users were often confronted with multiple applications, some on their PCs, some of their mobile devices, with different UIs, different security logins, frequent app switching and non-sharing of data between the apps. In addition, all users accessed the same UI increasing number of taps or clicks to go past steps that may not be relevant to their role. This was painful and very inefficient. To tackle this, MobileForce developed a way for companies to access key enterprise data and processes through a unified, secure, enterprise container app that runs on iOS, Android and HTML5 platforms. This consistent, secure and 'single pane of glass' experience, personalized to each user's role, across all BYOD and corporate-owned devices was a huge leap forward.

Since enterprise applications were never designed for the mobile era, or for an era of ubiquitous analytics and user journey research, the majority of them cannot provide detailed analysis on how field sales or partners or service teams are actually using an application. This information - what assets they click on the most, how they move from one screen to the next or one menu to the next, and other work processes that are invariably user defined (whether the software company or IT department likes it or not) - are essential in determining how effective an application actually is and in informing how to improve the application in subsequent iterations.

The MobileForce Solution
Looking at this fragmented market, MobileForce Software has adopted a comprehensive mobility strategy of viewing this from a configurability perspective in customizing applications and records through its out-of-the-boxzero coding solution. This helps the non-programmers inside the organization involved in sales and marketing operations who are reasonably tech savvy to utilize these solutions and rapidly unify relevant systems and mobile-enable their entire workforce. Leading innovatively with this change, the firm has thus eliminated the pain of development time stitching together mobile front-end, back ends and security frameworks from multiple vendors, making way for a paradigm change by providing the entire "mobile solution stack" as a service.In the words of Jagadish, "This transformation means that there will be a single mobile application as a service that incorporates mobile back end, user interface/experience, security,app management and analytics components, provided through a cloud capability without any coding."

Targeting large and medium sized companies, including Global 2000, the firm has its initial focus on Sales enablement to help customers boost their sales efficiency by providing a comprehensive mobility solution at the edge. This adds to the credentials of the firm's Sales Velocity solution helping companies drive faster sales, increase customer reach,offering better conversion rate, and shortened sales cycle. The Sales enablement platform has also given way for a partner driven approach, which is one of the company's core objectives. The MobileForce Partner Network recently launched by the firm enables vast line-of-business oriented partners to rapidly capitalize on enterprise mobility market opportunities and helps maximize partner profitability. Through the partner network, solution providers and system integrators can now team up and leverage the firm's cutting edge innovation to add their value services around,thus capturing a piece of this high growth trend. One of the larger areas MobileForce Software is focused on moving forward beyond Sales enablement is the automation of IT.

A Holistic Vision
With a vision of providing the entire mobile and integration stack as a service, MobileForce Software aspires to be the world leader in connecting enterprise users to their critical data through intelligent software; thereby empowering every business user to excel everyday by always delivering them right information at the right time. To realize this, the firm is continuing its investment in R&D and driving innovation in the enterprise mobility marketplace. "Strengthening our features sets, contextual awareness, application connectors, enabling richer user experiences as new devices are released and continuing to invest in driving improved performance and security are major focus areas for us and what our customers have been asking for", says the CEO.


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