Enterprise software has long been restricted to business users who are expected to perform the transactions or view information with limited user interface options — normally a laptop or a PC. In today’s context, the definition of business users has been extended to people who perform business functions, beyond the transactional users. The change has also happened with managers and senior managers who seek to access information on a self-service basis rather than be supplied information by others.

The dynamic nature of business as well as the freedom to operate from different parts of the world and at odd times have also created a need for alternative methods of being connected to the enterprise software that is deployed in organizations. Approvals for transactions are expected anytime since, with many organizations, business is operating almost 24x7.

Mobile business applications are the next revolution of extending enterprise software to the business end user, who may carry a smart mobile handset like an iPad, mobile phone, or BlackBerry, and who is connected online to a network on a 24x7 basis. This is especially relevant to the Indian context, with the explosion in the number of mobile connections that have happened recently, and with the introduction of 3G technology. As of July 2010, India has more than 635 million mobile phone connections and is adding five to six million new connections every month. The recent statistics show that 15 percent of the connections are on smartphones, which translates to about 95 million connections. On a rough estimate, 50 percent of the smartphones are being used for business purposes. That indicates at least 40 to 50 million mobile phone connections that are potential users for running mobile business applications. BlackBerry alone has about 4,000,00 connections in India.

Mobile phones have even penetrated rural areas. With the focus of many corporations being business at the bottom of the pyramid, there is wider scope for capturing business transactions happening in rural areas on smart mobile handsets.

Thus, the next revolution would be to build and deploy mobile business transactions by enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors, in close collaboration with telecom companies. Telecom companies would use their network reach to be able to connect the ERP solutions with the centralized hosting capabilities they may possess for the mobile applications. This may present a new revenue stream for them. ERP vendors like SAP are already offering mobile development platform and standard customer relationship management(CRM) and ERP-centric transactions that help business users in sales and customer-facing functions to be able to perform transactions. Integration of mobile business applications back to enterprise software is a critical requirement, and SAP, for example, already offers the SAP NetWeaver Process Integrator offering to be able to orchestrate transactions.