6 Tips To POWER Up Enterprise Mobility!

It’s not hard to imagine that every person shares 14 instagram photos every day for a year.  That’s equivalent to 190 Exabytes of mobile data traffic projected for 2018 according to Cisco Mobile Traffic Forecast. Mobile data traffic grew 81 percent last year, 18 times more than all traffic across the global internet in 2000.

The growth comes from videos, smart phones, iOS  devices, 4G connections and M2M (machine to machine connections) goes mainstream.  By end of 2018, there will be more on mobile-connected devices on earth than people – 10 billion devices vs 7.6 billion people!

Lead with mobile

While 67% of CIOs and IT professionals believe mobility will impact their business, 85% of enterprises have no plans to employ a single mobile leader and they are not working too closely with the IT infrastructure team.

CIO Insights says mobile app testing will take up a quarter of IT budget. IBM Worklight Study predicts 75% of Fortune 500 companies will deploy HTML5 mobile apps.  Appcelerator Mobile Study finds that the first apps developed likely to be made up of 38% on B2C, 47% B2B and 63% B2E.

It’s crucial for an organization to consider these areas:

1. Develop Right From The Start

Users are going to want a more valuable experience – consistent user experience, personalized services, more functionality, better reliability and faster response time. 

It’s less complicated and requires less testing for developers to write applications for reliable hardware solutions than is to make software more resilient to compensate for the hardware’s shortcomings. Running with IBM Power lets developers focus on the user experience rather than on infrastructure workarounds.

Power is preloaded with a wide range of tools and applications to simply mobile development, such as WebSphere, which with Power’s SMT8 (the multi-threading technology) makes application development run faster and more efficiently. It saves future worries when you develop the mobile applications RIGHT from the start.

Worklight Foundation software, also part of the power Systems solution portfolio, helps users build, test, run and manage mobile applications. It has an automated versioning that saves time and expense to code and run on any device type, without having to be rewritten, enabling faster time to market and a broader market from these applications.

  

2. Access & Keep Data Secure

To deliver personalization for customers, mobile apps need to link to traditional systems, such as customer, inventory and supply databases.

Tech news reports are full of concern over data management: where data is stored, by whom and for what purpose. Most users are not familiar with data management process or user agreements.

The mobile space in the role of systems of engagement (SOE) needs to link to the traditional systems of record (SOR) where there are structured tools that support a wide array of data processing and data storage.

SORs are critical for delivering mobile experiences.  A physical in-house server allows for both the security and reliability of enterprise data. It helps create a very controlled environment for the data to live.  An internal system is practical for customers with concerns about intellectual property or confidential data.

IBM Power Systems is a mobile infrastructure solution offering security, high performance, reliability and versatility to mobile platform.

3. Process Information Fast

Mobile users expect dynamic content, but they also expect a consistent user experience – in terms of speed, functionality and reliability.  IBM Senior Solution Architect Bruce Semple says, “When you reach for your mobile device, you want to start that app up – you assume it’s going to be there. If it doesn’t work, you might unload it and get a different one.”

The challenge is maintaining the value of the experience while executing complex data-sourcing processes and computations that deliver relevant information to the end user.

This is why infrastructure is so important.  IT departments often go for x86 servers thinking they are cheaper, but they have not considered the cost of losing potential customers or worse, losing customers from not being able to deliver the customized experience expected.

Imagine, on any two-lane road, each lane can support only one stream of traffic in each direction; an eight-lane highway can move more traffic simultaneously, reducing congestion and decreasing the time and energy it takes each vehicle to reach its destination.

This analogy demonstrates how a Power8 system handles data as compared with an x86 server. Having eight processor threads per core (as compared with two threads per core on x86), Power8 is geared to handle the advanced queries faster, keeping response time short so users experience no latency.

4. Built for Big Data

Power8 not only opens the “road”, it creates “paring lots’ for data, with greater memory capacity. Power8 , built for big data, is perfectly suited for the mobile environment. There’s a much larger memory bandwidth and capacity, that means more memory can be placed under a single CPU, providing a better user experience using fewer systems.  Power8’s ability to process and holder larger chunks of information permits the delivery of richer content while maintaining the platform’s immediacy.

Power Systems are about twice as fast on average as leading competitors. If you combine Power hardware with optimized software, IBM Power is 82 times faster on big data. The real benefit comes in when we consider next generation applications with advanced mobile interaction and richer file sizes.

5. Prepare To Scale

Companies who deploy mobile strategies must remember to foresee the growth rate at the time of its inception.  Some companies attempt to launch lightweight apps that an introduction into the marketplace may explode into a large end user base. 

Some think that pubic cloud can help buffer the increase. But if it is not planned as part of the private and hybrid cloud strategy, it will not cater to the viral adoption that may trigger dramatic increase in user volume.

Unexpected events can trigger flash adoption of a mobile platform. In some instances, the change is limited to such a short period of time that extending the server sprawl to compensate would be wasteful once traffic returns to normal levels.

For retailer Bin-Ton, this was the case during the 2013 holiday season. As is true of many retailers, ecommerce business sees its highest traffic during the holiday season. Unlike brick and mortar equivalents, if an online or mobile site crashes, there is no backup system. The previous year Bon-Ton had seen its x86 servers reach a peak utilization of a dangerous 95%-96%. IBM was able to transition them over to PowerLinux servers that were fine-tuned to provide a per-core throughput 2.5 times greater than they were seeing previously.  This translated to using only 50% of the server’s computing power under the same level of stress.

Power Systems are resilient enough to allocate more computing power in these instances, scaling with demand to constantly deliver a consistent user experience, no matter how many people are connecting.

6. Open Development & Mutual Innovation

To accommodate the immediacy of today’s mobile market and help people customize their systems, Power’s Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) capabilities open the door for vendors and members of the OpenPower Foundation to add hardware and software accelerators tightly coupled to the Power system.

Power’s OpenPower Foundation lets technology companies collaborate for mobile, so any company can help enhance the capabilities of the Power infrastructure.  This offers a stream of innovation that is available to Power Systems clients.

The mutually beneficial consortium establishes an ecosystem of innovation around mobile development, says Bruce Anthony, CTO of Mobile & Wireless Systems, IBM STG. It offers a greater degree of openness and innovation in terms of how technology is made available to infrastructure companies. And as they understand the unique needs of their customers and the infrastructure that they’re supplying, they can apply that knowledge about their customers directly into the technology and either add new instructions or take advantage of the CAPI interface to create accelerators.

Enable The Future

With the evolving mobile landscape, there will be challenges for developers and enterprises alike.  Our advice is – don’t think about today’s mobile apps, think about what you could do with mobile in the future.  We should enable the future.