Mulesoft has released a new version of their Anypoint software. Anypoint facilitates mobile app development by helping developers create apps which connect and interact with other popular systems, such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP, Siebel and many other popular enterprise platforms and services.
As the Press Release indicates, the importance of connectivity is often underrated during mobile app design and development.
Today, consumers demand seamless interactions with the companies they do business with, regardless of the channel, device or location. Mobile and data-driven initiatives represent a potential opportunity to create new sources of competitive advantage; however, IT professionals and businesses are challenged to integrate fragmented legacy, cloud and mobile endpoints to create that advantage, even as the volume and potential value driven by those connections continue to grow exponentially. Anypoint Platform provides a unified platform for connectivity that ensures security and adherence to best practice, while enabling rapid creation of new applications, including mobile, to meet new business demands.
According to Gartner, “Integration is an often-underestimated aspect of mobile application development projects. A notable portion of an overall mobile app project cost — as much as 70% in some cases — can be attributed to integrating the mobile app with established enterprise applications, services and data sources, whether on-premises or in the cloud.”
Business users regularly shift data between different software packages and mobile apps, and different platforms – iPhone App platform, Android App Platform, whatever is convenient. For example, if you are working on a presentation you might want to import graphs from your spreadsheet package, or create a summary using your accounting package, and include the results in your presentation. Conversely, if you are searching for a document, you might want the contents of your presentations and other documents to be available to your search utility.
If you want your business mobile app to attract interest from industry, one of the first questions you have to answer is – how do I get the data out of your app into package X? How do I import data into your app? Anything you can do to integrate your new business app with packages which are familiar to your target audience increases the acceptability of your new business mobile app – increases the chance that your target audience will see your app as an essential component of their software infrastructure.
Even games apps can benefit from interaction. In a lot of ways games are behind the curve when it comes to interaction – there’s growing recognition of the value of interacting with social media, such as Facebook, but the interaction has to date been in many ways quite shallow. Up until now games developers have been fiercely independent, and have attempted to build loyalty to their proprietary offering by keeping it proprietary and separate from other game universes.
But just imagine you could create a favourite character in say World of Warcraft, and import that character into the Lord of the Rings universe, or into say Second Life? How cool would that convergence be?
If you would like to learn more about the options for connecting your business iPhone App or business Android App to other systems, please Contact Me