With so much noise surrounding the sheer number of applications in Apple’s App Store, as well as the ramping of content on Android Market, it has been refreshing to hear more from RIM recently about quality not quantity of applications.

To get this message across, RIM announced the concept of “Super Apps”. Although I am not especially keen on the name, it was absolutely necessary to look at how people use applications and how they should be integrated into the operating environment to offer the richest, most complete user experience, that sits squarely with RIM’s philosophy of offering the richest most integrated user experience available.

Which of course leads to the question “what is a super app?”. According to RIM, a super app must:

1. Offer an “Always-on” Experience: BlackBerry OS allows multitasking, with the idea that a super app can run in the background and even start up automatically with no user action required. This allows for much of the apps work to happen seamlessly, without an app chugging away in the foreground.
2. Tight Integration with Native Apps: The key to the BlackBerry experience is the simplicity, especially core functions such as inbox, calendar, address book, phone as well as camera and browser. RIM’s API frameworks allow developers to include menu/drop-down items into these core functions, reducing the need to constantly switch between applications, integrating seamlessly with the native app experience
3. Proactive and Notification-driven: RIM’s push infrastructure allows for apps to proactively  notify a user of the right information at the right time. They can notify the user in many ways when a certain event occurs or relevant data arrives to the device
4. Highly Contextualized: Utilising RIM’s location APIs allows for app development that is relevant and contextual utilising not only GPS, but cell site location and geo-coding as well as deeply integrated.
5. Social and Connected Allows for integration of third party apps into the email, SMS, MMS or chat clients to enable users to share content from your apps with others in their address book
6. Designed for Efficiency: A core part of RIM’s ethos is efficiency, offered through and end-to-end architecture that is optimized for “always-on environments”. Super Apps should be built with efficiency and scalability in mind.

In many ways, super apps highlight how RIM has opened up more APIs and services, as well as improving tooling resources for developers. The new services go much deeper than before, and offer major opportunities to integrate apps with native functions (such as the email inbox), as well as with payment and advertising functions among others.

It has already been shown how users will pay for richer, more deeply integrated applications: iPhone Users Install Most Applications but BlackBerry Owners Pay for More

Mobile enterprise applications will also benefit dramatically from the deep integration into core functions and resolve the major issues of certain types of applications (especially CRM) behaving “in an offline state”. Oracle demonstrated how healthcare workflow applications can benefit from this level of integration on a BlackBerry, and the results were impressive.

Ultimately, it is about time another OEM (Nokia excluded) started talking about rich, deeply integrated experiences, rather than focusing on sheer app volumes in “app silos”. Surely one deeply integrated, rich application that is genuinely useful holds sway over 200 apps that lack any rich integration whatsoever?

Andrew Brown

Mobility and the “Real Time” Enterprise

A Techcrunch article about Jive’s new app marketplace over the past week got me thinking again about the role of mobility and social media in the enterprise. In another survey concerning “web-workers”, it is alleged that 85% of workers use their mobile phone as their primary communications device, 60% use VoIP with only 46% using fixed line communications as a primary communication tool. Both mobility and social media are important enterprise tools.

• In recent years, as businesses have started evolving toward more people-centric collaborative environments powered by wikis and other social software solutions, real time has become an integral part of the social software stack that colleagues use to communicate and work together.

Not one player has successfully extended a social revolution to the enterprise successfully.

Major ISVs and enterprise vendors have attempted to integrate social media into the enterprise, including Microsoft with SharePoint with its wiki-style pages and built-in messaging, and Salesforce.com with a Twitter-style Chatter service, but nobody has really succeeded.

The challenge for enterprise social media is two fold. First, most enterprises have corporate standards governing firewalls, security and licensed software, which is installed and maintained by IT departments and secondly the web world of beta software, open standards and an “anything-goes” kind of approach to social networks and information sharing is incongruous to corporate IT environments.

Jive are one company looking to change that, but whether Jive’s blend of open APIs, an open app marketplace and installed software can successfully bring these two worlds together remains to be seen. After all, Google is now making inroads into business with the most complete offering of these two components so far, Google Apps.

Essentially, however, the issue comes from the fact that there’s little cognizance of business process activity that generally takes place within traditional ERP, CRM and supply chain systems. These traditional applications address critical functions in the enterprise that are closely tied activities that can be measured in the form of increase revenue or reduced costs. 

• Also, from a user point of view, “making it look like Facebook, doesn’t make it Facebook”, even if it helps a user to navigate through familiarity! Consider that Linked In has 35 million members compared to over 400 million for Facebook!

Mobility is becoming a key part of enterprise strategy, and companies face the simultaneous challenge of trying to integrate both social media and mobility (as well as enabling social media platforms on mobile platforms).

• Add to this the task of managing individual liable devices within companies, and the challenge facing IT departments seems even more daunting. IT managers then face a critical decision between tightly “ring -fenced” corporate environments or take the altogether riskier approach of opening up their environments altogether.

With the ever intensifying app war out in the smartphone marketplace, BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion has upped the ante by offering a new push service for BlackBerry software developers to enable rapid delivery of application-content to BlackBerry smartphones. It’s no secret that RIM has a market leading user experience for mobile push email, underpinned by it’s “ground-up for wireless” network architecture, but finally RIM is taking the game to Apple and Android developers where all the noise is being made, by leveraging its network operations centre (NOC).

Push applications are not new to the BlackBerry, but access to the required BlackBerry APIs and other resources was costly in the past and the necessary fees were prohibitive to many application developers. It seems as though access to APIs in version 5 of the handheld software is going to be a game changer.

The push service is being made available in two tiers:

• BlackBerry Push Essentials is a free service while
• BlackBerry Push Plus has a free tier and paid tiers, but essentially allows a host of monitoring and scheduling tools as well as offering pricing tiers for very high push notification loads (10,000+)

Developers are required to meet some baseline criteria

• Applications must provide a one-time message to indicate push usage to the user
• Software must indicate higher data pricing when roaming and that users should check with their carrier for data pricing
• Apps must allow users to switch pushes on or off
• Users must be able to remove the app and/or change BlackBerry smartphones

RIM is bullish about the offering, which it describes as: “…unlike alternative push solutions that can only notify users that new content is available for download because of push message size limitations, with the BlackBerry Push Service, full content (up to an industry-leading 8KB in size) is pushed to the device and made immediately available for use."

I’m excited by this announcement. As expected, most of the focus has been on consumer content, especially news, stocks and sports, but the real value is in how this changes, or rather enhances the BlackBerry user experience. RIM’s architecture facilitates "listening" for content updates, instead of having to initiate what can be lengthy processes via comparable mobile app push services. The service will run on BIS and BES and will put itself in a strong position for business applications, by bringing updates to the user, rather than a user foraging for information. There are already some solid examples of push app technology, from patient information in healthcare and sales force automation to emergency response.

Competition is fierce, and the number of personal liable devices forcing their way into businesses will keep growing. With BESX RIM is allowing IT departments and administrators to “bend without breaking” while this announcement sees RIM really starting to extract maximum value from its architecture, which will allow the company to differentiate itself from competition. RIM is now effectively placing itself both in the minds of consumers and businesses.

Andrew Brown