Oracle has outlined an aggressive Australian channel-centric mobility strategy to take advantage of the increasing shift to BYOD and a “mobile first” marketing approach.
This follows a December IDC Whitepaper which predicted almost 75 per cent of Australian companies would increase their mobility spend in 2014.
The Whitepaper also revealed that many organisations which rushed into BYOD encountered costly errors and were dissatisfied with the results.
Oracle VP mobile strategy and product management, Suhas Uliyar, said the key stumbling blocks were security and the integration of applications into the back end of the business.
“Bring Your Own Device has two main challenges. The number one challenge is how do I build an application once and run it on multiple form factors and multiple operating systems,” he said.
“The other challenge is… in BYOD there’s a shift in enterprise from corporate devices to BYOD, so at what level do you manage those devices.
“How do you manage the applications? the identity of the user? how do you ensure there’s no data leakage?”
“Oracle’s strategy is to really simplify enterprise mobility.”
Oracle ADF Mobile enables enterprises to rapidly and visually develop single-source applications that leverage Java and HTML5 to deploy and run on both the Apple iOS and Google Android, thus enabling a single application on multiple devices and channels.
Further, Oracle Identity Management, enterprises can enable single sign-on to any application from any device, accelerated application lifecycle and simplified evolution of fine-grained security policies for mobile.
Uliyar said marketing departments were also moving to a “mobile-first” environment where apps had become the new window to a company with the increasing proliferation of mobile devices.
"Being able to design a new product which gives consumers incentive to interact with the company is creating a new category of business to consumer apps,” he said.
“Our strategy is to provide the customer with tools to leverage their existing skillsets in Java to build custom apps and extending existing apps.
"We have created a new platform called the mobile suite which allows a client developer to drag and drop all the essential tools to build a mobile client application cross platform,” he said.
“So you build the application once on the same code base and you can target it to multiple devices - that really reduces your cost of development and also keeps it up to date.”
Uliyar said the mobile strategy was not anything like a “cookie-cutter” strategy.
“This helps our channel partners to be able to build mobile apps and it helps them to build their own IP, so as they’re building these components it’s very easy for them to take something they have built and being to monetise that IP by selling it to the customer,” he said.
“It’s very channel-centric and channel friendly. We are putting a lot of emphasis around programs for channel partners to be much more mobile enabled.”
