Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
The volume of cloud-based announcements at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week reflected enterprises’ interest in having mobile services and applications delivered “as a service.” Many organizations are waking up to the flexibility and cost savings that cloud can bring.
According to Gartner, platform as a service (PaaS) revenues reached $1.2 billion worldwide in 2012, up from $900 million in 2011. The research firm forecasts the market will grow to $1.5 billion in 2013 and $2.9 billion in 2016. Gartner’s definition of PaaS includes suites of application infrastructure services, such as application platform as a service (aPaaS) and integration platform as a service (iPaaS).
The fact that mobile applications are being hosted and delivered increasingly in the cloud creates a need for greater testing in the cloud environment. But what enterprises often overlook is the fact that in today’s rapidly changing, agile development environment, it is becoming even more important to have structured testing processes in place.
Today, mobile application use goes beyond the closed, fixed IT model of determining which identified computer user is accessing which secured software and when. Employees bring their own mobile devices to work or download external applications onto enterprise mobile devices with a freedom that would be unimaginable with company desktop computers. The result has been innovation in working practices and services; nobody wants to turn the clock back on the mobile enterprise revolution.
Yet mobile enterprise applications do not operate in a vacuum. They are part of a finely-tuned and complex ecosystem of existing enterprise applications. And the more important a role that mobile applications play in enterprise computing, the more essential it becomes to test how mobile applications interplay with existing back-end systems.
Mobile can provide real-time access to business critical information residing in existing back-end systems, enabling employees to draw instantly on information that shapes business decisions, regardless of where they are. And it provides customers with access to information that affects how they buy and use services. But if mobile applications and solutions are not tested alongside the legacy systems with which they interact, they risk degrading service performance and response times.
Enterprise quality assurance testing departments face an overwhelming array of mobile applications, browsers, operating systems and devices. Some choose to bolster in-house skills; others outsource testing, including testing-as-a-service in the cloud. But the bottom line is that no serious mobile deployment can afford to overlook the need to test how a mobile application affects the security, functioning and usability of an enterprise’s existing systems.
Fernando Alvarez leads Capgemini’s recently launched Mobile Solutions Global Service Line.
