The future of business applications behind mobile "clouds"

Juniper Research predicts that the total amount of the market of "cloud" mobile applications will grow by 88% between 2009 and 2014 and about 75% of this market will be occupied by corporate users.

In the research ABI Research conducted the previous year it was said that the new, "cloud" architecture of applications for mobile devices will cardinally change the future developed, the used and bought programs. "Cloud" services will facilitate their creation for developers due to minimization of number of the code which they are forced to configure for each of mobile platforms.

Today this trend is in embryo, but experts of ABI Research consider that finally it will become the prevailing model for mobile applications, Mark Beccue, the analyst of the company wrote in the report.

Connection of mobile application to "cloud" services has also other advantages to the enterprises, John Barnes, the technical director of Model Metrics, developer company of applications which interact with Salesforce.com and network services of Amazon.com considers.

One of advantages of "cloud" platforms that you can synchronize the mobile device with "cloud" without intermediate servers or VPN (Virtual Private Network is a virtual private network), he says. It means, deployment can become simpler for the companies, not persons interested manage the internal servers supporting mobile applications.

"We observe that mobile devices change as business applications are unrolled", - Ariel Kelman, the marketing vice president of products on the Salesforce.com platform noted. This company provider offers API interfaces and work benches for assistance to the enterprises in improvement of applications which they created on Force.com, for iPhone or the BlackBerry phones.

Two histories of successful immersion in "clouds"

The American company Rehabcare owns 34 hospitals through the whole country and controls even more than one thousand medical institutions. The mobile application created on Force.com allows Rehabcare to look more competitive when there is a fight for each patient, Dick Escue, the Chief information officer of the company told.

As a rule, when the patient is discharged from hospital, but needs further assistance, the hospital notifies all nearby medical institutions the message about need of care of this patient. Earlier the ranking officer in each Rehabcare organization filled manually a seven-page form of the patient and faxed it to the medical director in Rehabcare regional office who then decided whether it is necessary to accept the patient. It was the long process depending on legibility of handwriting of the worker and the medical director.

As a result the company made the decision to create the iPhone-application accelerating this process. Use of an iPhone-application allowed to reduce processing of data of the patient on average from six-eight to one-two o'clock. Then Rehabcare unrolled the second mobile application which addresses the services based on "cloud". As a result the company provided thousands of doctors with the iPad Touches device which they use to access to the application written and placed on Casamba.

One more company - Critical Systems – uses an iPhone-application which works in combination with the service placed in "cloud". The company is engaged in check of fire alarm systems (PS). Earlier, inspectors visited the building and entered state-of-health data of PS into the table Excel. At the end of the week the inspector reset from a disk data at office Critical Systems where Jim Boudreaux, the developer of the company, printed reports, and then manually assigned the color code for each tested device in the CAD file on the basis of results of work of the inspector. Occasionally three months for preparation and sending to the client of the report on check left.

As a result of Boudreau began with development and implementation of the application for Salesforce which allowed inspectors to enter and keep results of their checks in "cloud" on Salesforce. A portable device for serving notebooks were considered, but was decided to refuse them because of bulkiness. As a result the application was written for iPhone. With its help it was succeeded to reduce transfer of the reporting of customers from three months to one day.

Rehabcare and Critical Systems recognize that use of "cloud" calculations made use and support of mobile applications it is much simpler, than if they tried to unroll it on internal resources.