Smelling a journalistic opportunity, I managed to grab ten minutes with Regev Yativ, our President and CEO for the Americas, who happened to be visiting Magic Software's HQ during this holiday week.
Regev has been making waves in 2009, particularly with Magic Software's mobile solution offering. Below is the full transcript of our interview.
Also, here is our latest White Paper: '6 Tips for Building Mobile Enterprise Applications in 2010'
The Mobile Enterprise Market - An Interview with Regev Yativ. By Sam Green.
SG: What's your take on the shape of the mobile market as we head into 2010?
RY: We are seeing some misconceptions in the mobile market where people tend to confuse the "mass mobile market" and the enterprise mobile market. The mass market requires a very high level of browser based interactivity, AV streaming and a number of other basic functions that are not always relevant for enterprise users. However, since mobile devices are today as basic as bread and butter, it means that enterprise users are being influenced more than ever before by the use and functionality of their devices and are looking to develop new expectations in their work environment as well. They are all focused on what they can do more with their mobile device or PDA.
So the mass market today is more of an influencer than ever before. We must nevertheless remember that it's not the end-game. So when we talk about Magic Software's mobile offering, we are referring specifically to solutions especially designed for enterprises.
SG: What does Magic Software have to offer that's unique?
RY: I believe that the beauty of our offering is its simplicity. The uniPaaS mobile client that we are talking about today is simply an additional deployment mode of an otherwise uniPaaS-developed Rich Internet Application (RIA). This is one of the biggest advantages that Magic Software has to offer today. As a Magic customer, this means you can take a single set of code that you initially intended to deploy as a standard RIA application, and deploy that same code, with some modifications, as a mobile application. This does require some programming changes (such as scaling down the screen, adjusting the presentation etc) however; the level of modification needed is minor when you work in the uniPaaS environment. This is great news for all operators looking to transfer their applications onto mobile devices quickly and smoothly.
SG: What does this mean practically for enterprises out there?
RY: Practically, this means that if I have a mobile workforce in an enterprise environment, or workers based in remote locations, or away-from-office teams, with different smart phones and PDAs that are being operated from anywhere in the world, I can now integrate these workers into my enterprise resource pool and exploit such resources seamlessly, as if they were sitting next door.
As an example, if you're a field engineer, and you're sent to Texas to fix an oil pump in the middle of nowhere, it can be very difficult to get connectivity into your enterprise resources in a conventional way. It may also be impractical to use standard computers and laptops. In such a situation you could now turn to your mobile phone or smart phone and use a uniPaaS mobile client to connect and fully use the functionality of your enterprise application as if you never left the office.
And of course, we must remember that this level of immediate service is worth diamonds to the customer. As one can imagine, each hour that the oil pump is out of operation it costs millions in damages and lost revenues.
SG: What's your main focus for 2010 and beyond regarding mobile solutions?
RY: Currently, Magic Software is already deployed on the Windows CE/mobile environment for several customers. We also have a number of customers now examining this option for deployment in 2010. Along with this, we are planning to come to market in the first quarters of 2010 with specialized web templates and functionality for the most common mobile platforms such as Blackberry and iPhone. Considering that the majority of enterprises in the US run Blackberry and for the most part run Blackberry enterprise servers as well, our main strategy for the coming year will be to invest in perfecting our Blackberry enterprise offering.
The agility of our uniPaaS unitary platform combined with the integration layer that iBOLT brings will be playing a key role in achieving the sort of specialized solutions that Blackberry and other mobile platforms users are looking for in fields ranging from heavy industry to government, local municipalities and corporate sectors.
SG: Tell me more about how Magic Software's iBOLT business integration suite is being used to improve the mobile enterprise experience for customers?
RY: One of the unique advantages of Magic Software is the fact that we have an unrivalled and multi-layered technology stack. At the front-end this takes the shape of the uniPaaS application platform that allows you to rapidly and cost-effectively build and deploy your mobile application as we discussed earlier. At the back-end this takes the form of the iBOLT business integration suite that lets you integrate your mobile application with a host of other business applications in the enterprise.
By linking mobile application development and deployment with enterprise application integration, many of our customers are now able to optimize and streamline their operations. As a result they can better exploit out-of-office resources, and all this works towards saving an enormous amount of money as well as creating new business opportunities.
One of the key messages we are trying to deliver regarding mobility is that it's not enough to convert ‘data' into ‘information'. It's also vital that you have maximum accessibility to this information - allowing decision makers to make accurate business decisions in real time.
To summarize, our strategy is to help our customers reach their full ‘information mobility' potential - from both ends of the enterprise, from corporate management for overall decision making to the workforce for enabling better operations and customer service.
On a personal note, from the constant interaction we have with customers, partners and analysts, we have no doubt that the mobile enterprise market is going to explode in the coming years and we are very excited to be in a position where we can offer and deliver in stages, all the needed solutions to support that.
SG: Thank you for your time and we look forward to hearing from you again later in the year.
RY: Thank you.
Following on from my previous manufacturing posts, I've now compiled the main 5 benefits of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) for manufacturing industries into a new white paper that you can download for free here.
Rich Internet Applications are particularly beneficial to manufacturing companies. That's because the nature of manufacturing requires a combination of powerful business functionality (to handle their diverse work scope - including production, delivery, inventory, sales force etc), that they need to display in a myriad of ways (graphically and in complex table format), and they need it available anywhere (at the production line site as well as on the move in the warehouse etc).
They can get this sort of rich internet functionality today by sourcing it from a SaaS vendor of course. It's quick to assimilate, and cost-effective to run. The only problem is if the vendor doesn't have exactly the type of functionality that the manufacturer needs. There's not much room for customization with an off-the-shelf SaaS product.
There is then an advantage to building your own RIA in house - as long as it can be done without incurring high costs and an over-long development effort!
The white paper first highlights the benefits of RIA to manufacturers and then describes the most efficient and effective path to implementing RIA in-house.
All comments and feeback are welcome!
In a 2009 UK based survey commissioned by the 'The Loyalty Practice at HS&P' it was found that almost one quarter of British consumers say they are less brand loyal now than they were 12 months ago.
According to Louise Isaacs, head of The Loyalty Practice, "With cash-conscious consumers paying closer attention to the purchases they make, businesses are having to fight harder to keep customers coming back."
And his solution: "brands must focus more on engaging customers during their buying cycle to capture more data and build better relationships."
Obvious really - in a business environment where customers are more demanding and brand loyalty harder to capture and keep, customer engagement is key to an organization's success.
In a recent study on engagement by the Economist Intelligence Unit, 80% of executives said that better engagement translates into improved customer loyalty, and 75% said they believed it meant higher profits.
Engagement is critical to transforming customers into active advocates for a product or business. That's where Rich Internet Applications (RIA) are making headway.
In March 2007, Forrester Research published The Business Case for Rich Internet Applications, a report based on interviews with RIA technology providers and designers, as well as Forrester Research clients and customers. The report revealed that "well-designed RIAs can produce eye-popping results that can help prove the value of current investments and make the case for future RIA projects."
RIAs can make customer interactions more compelling, dynamic, and useful - in short - more engaging. And this is what will give businesses that critical edge over their competitors when times are tough - and it looks like these times are settling in for quite a long stay.
What's wrong with this picture: A sales person calls a potential customer. He then visits the customer to show or demonstrate his wares. The customer decides to buy and makes an order. With the deal closed, our sales person returns to his office and checks with the back-end system to see if the wares the customer wants are in stock.
Woops! Stop right there. What happens if the product is NOT in stock, or the manufacturer was late in delivering, or there's a glitch in production, or if there's a new price list our sales person wasn't aware of?
What happens when you've told your customer that you can deliver in X days and it will cost Y amount - and now you've got to run the embarrassment and risk of calling the customer again to tell him you were wrong.
There's a good chance the customer will cancel the deal, or just not buy from you again, right?
Now consider this. If our sales person had a mobile device, and he could directly view and enter data into the company's back-end system - then he could enter the order himself, make sure the product is in stock, and quote the correct price - ALL WHILE SITTING IN FRONT OF THE CUSTOMER.
That's the power of Rich Internet Applications. But you don't have to take it from me. Here's how Soviet Jeans managed to turn around their sales process and their customer service using uniPaaS RIA.
Continuing yesterday's post on the various merits of IE and browser-based applications vs. uniPaaS browse-free technology.
I've attached here a screen-shot from the uniPaaS demo - that shows both a pull-down menu (Application Flow) and a drop-down screen (Customer List). Now note the fact that this is an INTERNET based application - but without the cumbersome IE, Firefox or Safari sandboxes. Yet it feels, behaves and responds with all the richness of a desktop Client-Server application!
To really appreciate the power and business potential of this I recommend trying the demo for yourself. It's easy to download and it won't take you long to get the idea. Go to the link in the previous paragraph. As always, your views and comments are welcome.
Now you can. With Rich Internet Applications you can combine the functionality of fully interactive software with the broad reach and low cost deployment of the Web.
Just ask Magic Software how.
This is the advert I came up with a while back when racking my brains trying to convey the unique advantages of Rich Internet Applications over traditional software.
The key sentence that was playing in my mind at the time was that RIA gives users 'the best of both worlds'.
And what that means is that you get the powerful user experience that only locally installed Client-Server 'desktop' applications can provide (scrolling lists, multiple screen views, rapid data update etc), but you also get the benefit of internet based applications - i.e. anytime, anywhere access to your data, such as from a mobile device.
Anyway, this is the end advertisement image that we went with. If you still don't know what it is, it's supposed to be the body of an Arnold Schwarzenegger type (in his youth, of course) with the mind of an Einstein. Get it? The best of both worlds?? Thought so.
If you're a CIO, you've probably been asked to secure your internet applications against internet hacking at some point.
But that's becoming an increasingly tall order with security threats to internet based applications on the rise, with the strong growth being attributed to factors such as new viruses, malware and hacking attacks.
And it doesn't seem to matter which browser you use, whether it's Internet Explorer, FireFox (actually more vulnerable than IE, contrary to popular belief), Safari or others. Even the latest versions such as Internet Explorer 7, which claims a whole new set of security features probably won't be able to keep up with the robbers who always seem to be a step ahead of the cops.
According to security blogger Hon Lau: "In this day and age, the old advice of avoiding certain types of Web site and content on the Internet is no longer enough when even trusted sites have been known to be compromised in the past."
"Making sure your Web browser and other applications are fully patched, your Antivirus and Firewall software are running and up to date with the latest definitions sets and using a bit of street smarts should go a long way towards keeping you out of harm's way."
But all this security updating and maintenance is surely going to add up and put an additional strain on IT budgets. What if you could avoid the browser altogether, and yet still run a fully internet available business application?
Well, I only recently discovered that uniPaaS covers the security issue in two fantastic ways. Here's how:
- Since the uniPaaS RIA Client is an independent application and not browser based, it's not subjected to the security issues and attacks that browsers suffer from! Also, the message format and protocol used to communicate between the Server and Client in uniPaaS are proprietary and secured.
This means that a uniPaaS application runs on the internet, feels like a desktop app in terms of performance, AND has the security of a desktop app as well!
- I also found out something else: The uniPaaS Client does not directly access any back-end resources such as databases. Actually, it only communicates with the Magic Broker. This means that an enterprise company can isolate their users - preventing them from having direct access to the application database - and thus avoid potential employee data theft or corruption.
These are big issues with the global network security market predicted to reach about $9.5 billion by 2015.
uniPaaS could potentially change all that. Now I just have to get people to hear about it! Anyone have any ideas??
Thomas Wailgum in the on-line CIO journal does a good job counseling between the warring parties in the SaaS vs On-Premise debate.
To sum up, he finds that the imperfections in both the SaaS and On-premise model makes it imperative for enterprises to consider both - or some sort of hybrid option.
This is exactly what we've been arguing for all along - uniPaaS lets you develop and deploy SaaS while maintaining your existing On-Premise Apps - using a single codebase, which reduces costs to a single development and maintenance effort.
Building applications these days is not what it once was. There are a number of options to consider.
However, before you ponder for too long, take into account that Gartner expects 60 percent of all new application projects to use Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies within the next three years.
That's an important figure that's worth exploring a little bit.
RIA offers some unique business benefits for enterprises and in many ways is the ideal methodology for business applications -
The real value of Rich Internet Applications is that they overcome the limitations of both the desktop environment and the browser environment by combining the best of both worlds into a so-called ‘Fit Client'.
RIA's combine the richness of the desktop's ‘Fat' Client with the low operating cost of the internet's ‘Thin' Client.
RIAs are fully interactive, desktop-style, business applications that are installed at a single location and are accessible via any monitor via the internet. Depending on the platform, they can take advantage of the local computing power of a company's hardware, but without requiring the complex installation and maintenance typical of the "Fat Client".
If you stop to consider it, this is really a ground-breaking advantage for businesses facing the challenge of remaining competitive today. However, a technology that has the capacity to combine the best of desktop and internet is bought at a price; system complexity.
While the desktop, or Client-Server model, relies upon a permanent connection between Server and Client, and the internet model relies upon a decoupled connection between Server and Client, RIA attempts to find a middle ground.
That middle ground involves holding a part of the RIAs computing power on the Client side for simple activities while calling upon the Server when more complex instruction is required. While undoubtedly smarter, the RIA Client requires sophisticated state and session management. And this means more cost to the developer. Or potentially anyway.
Once deployed though, RIAs represent a true paradigm shift in the way businesses use and pay for software applications. The challenge is to successfully get to them.
All this means that there's a lot more to developing RIA than just a fancy-shmancy Client user interface. RIA tools that only provide the Client side of your appliction will leave you having to navigate a potential iceberg - with the bulk of your development effort not provided, and not paid for.
The iceberg is a nice analogy for the RIA development challenge.
To make RIA cost-effective and deliver on-time on-budget you need a tool that can provide what's beneath the surface of most Client-side tools: the Server-side logic, data managment, back-end integration, and of course, the coupling and context management that mediates with the Client.
In such a situation, trying to develop and deploy RIA using only a Silverlight or Adobe Air/Flex Client-side tool, or AJAX will potentially leave you high an dry - you'll have to find and pay for new Server side tools and then hire/employ the resources for the specialist code writing that's required.
All this means that you won't be delivering your finished application in a hurry. PLUS by trying to marry-up the efforts of multiple development teams you'll end up with an application that's more than likely not fully up to business requirements or corporate standards, or both.
The solution?
Simple. Get a tool that provides the entire spectrum of development and deployment i.e. an 'end-to-end' platform.
Since the main cost in developing RIA is the complex code writing for the different Client and Server ends of the application, an end-to-end platform such as uniPaaS comes with a ready-made business application engine that pre-compiles code and pre-configures business logic. This ‘metadata' covers both ‘ends' of the development process with the same development language.
This allows developers to bypass the strenuous code-writing stage and instead, focus on the business requirements of their application.
With a single solution that eliminates the need to write complex code or manage multiple development teams, there's less chance of project failure and more chance of delivering your application on-time, on-budget and up to business requirements.
Next time - more about metadata and how that helps you really sharpen your application development and delivery process.
In our previous post we established that too many IT projects are failing. By 'failure' we mean one or more of the following three things:
1. Not completed on-time
2. Not delivered on-budget
3. Doesn't answer the requirement brief
These three factors are particularly sore points today because of the recession. When budgets are tight the benefits of building business applications can be easily outweighed by the costs and effort involved.
That's why many are now opting for Cloud-based solutions that mitigate the risks and costs involved in building and deploying applications in-house.
Well, why not just opt for a SaaS solution like Salesforce.com then? The answer is that while Salesforce.com may be perfect for many enterprises and businesses, it ties you to the Force.com platform.
There is therefore, some insecurity knowing that your mission-critical data is held on another company's servers. There's also a limited scope in how much customization you can demand from your provider. One size generally fits all. And in some instances, this may not be good enough for businesses attempting to differentiate themselves from their competitors in today's tough economic climate.
What's needed then is a platform that can develop powerful, modern applications, such as Rich Internet Applications and SaaS, at low cost, while minimizing the chance of project 'runaways' and which combines the input of both IT specialists and business managers.
Not an easy order to fill.
So, what exactly does uniPaaS offer that's so different?
Well, it can be summarized in 3 short points:
1. uniPaaS is an end-to-end environment for software developers.
2. uniPaaS is based upon a metadata engine.
3. uniPaaS applications can run in multiple deployment modes.
Each of these three points deserves its own entirely dedicated post. So coming up we will deal exclusively with point 1 - uniPaaS' end-to-end environment - and what that means for businesses trying to deliver on-time, on-budget and according to project specs.