A few extra items on IBM’s mobile strategy from a panel here at IMPACT:
- IBM’s Worklight Platform is continuing to evolve (see this review of their MobileFirst portfolio) with a focus both on providing great middleware for native apps and support for hybrid applications. Recent improvements include QA tools, running the Worklight foundation in the cloud (using PureApplication Service), integration of the Worklight Foundation with the BlueMix API catalog, Cloudant and more. IBM has also been scaling up its service offerings around development, delivery and application management.
- Part of the mobile portfolio is focused on “engage” and supporting marketers. IBM sometimes talks about Xtify and its ability to push mobile notifications as though it is a marketing solution for mobile. It is better, I think, to consider it an extension to your marketing backend. To this end IBM is integrating Xtify with the Unica marketing portfolio. Connecting with the backend like this allows access to the Unica system but also to SPSS analytic capabilities, ODM and more to ensure better, more customer-centric decisions are being made as to what to push. Especially when this is combined with their Presence Zone capability that uses mobile location information to locate a customer in a store for instance as this allows a full array of customer information to be combined with location to push the right information to the customer.
- Obviously IBM’s portfolio has a lot of security, management, fraud detection, malware prevention and more. Increasingly the perspective has broadened from just protecting the device to also protecting the content, the transactions, the application as a whole etc.
- IBM sees customers getting really serious about mobile with strategic projects, senior sponsors etc. In response IBM has been rolling out a set of services to help with this kind of strategic focused mobile projects. In addition IBM has been rolling out training on mobile to its business process consultants and partners to make sure that process solutions are being mobilized.
- To help customers get started quickly IBM is investing in its Ready Apps – starter kits to accelerate and “de risk” journeys for customers as they adopt mobile. It’s not clear how these integrate with IBM’s various back-end capabilities but the idea of helping clients get to working mobile apps more quickly is a good one.
- More and more of IBM’s mobile projects are larger, including BPM and decision management capabilities. Some of the solutions are beginning to include BPM templates too and this is clearly going to be a focus area going forward.
IBM is clearly making a big push on mobile. I think the combination of a strong mobile management portfolio and its back-end decision management capabilities has great potential so it will be interesting to see how IBM evolves them in parallel.
If you are at IMPACT, come to my session today at 3:45 to hear my point of view on this.
Cross-posted from JTonEDM.