What are the benefits of enterprise mobile app platform?

• Create apps and complex forms for any type of mobile device and OS without having to maintain separate sets of code.
• Create tailor-made apps for specific user groups, giving them exactly what they need; usually, a mash-up of reading/writing access to your backend systems, publicly available web services and device features such as camera, GPS, sign-on screen, etc.
• Requires basic and limited coding skills e.g. HTML and CSS.
• Allows a high degree of re-use of the code and interactions developed.
• Provide the offline capability for mobile users in areas without WiFi or cellular coverage.
• Once the platform is integrated into the important back-end systems, creating new apps and forms can be done in hours rather than weeks or months.
• Enterprise mobile application development services can be run on the cloud and purchased on a subscription basis.

Pros and cons of MEAP

Along with the benefits described above, a mobile enterprise application platform extends beyond fourth-generation language (4GL) tools for app development to use a graphical environment and dedicated script language. The tool makes business apps accessible to users from any location at any time. For ease of IT management, some MEAP products can run as a cloud service.

A MEAP, like any technology, comes with challenges. The initial investment is high - it's expensive to begin with, though the total cost of ownership (TCO) goes down with use over time - and it requires IT to perform additional tasks such as updating content, securing data, maintaining applications with updates and managing user authentication.

Important features

In general, a MEAP has two important features:

• A mobile application development environment and back-end web services to manage those mobile applications and link them to enterprise applications and databases.
• A centralized management component that enables an administrator to control which users can access an application and what enterprise databases that application can pull data from.

Sometimes, organizations will use a mobile enterprise application platform in conjunction with enterprise mobility management (EMM) or mobile device management (MDM). MDM manages mobile devices, while MEAP products manage the enterprise applications running on those devices - although there is sometimes overlap between the functionalities of these two technologies.