Vision from the Top 2012: Jeff Haynie, Appcelerator
In 2020, looking back on this decade, what will be the single most impactful technical advancement driving business growth?
It's clear to me that mobility will be the single most impactful technical advancement driving business growth in the next ten years ... and that's because mobility has been the single most impactful technical advancement in our personal lives over the past ten years.
Mobility is impacting humanity even faster than the web did. Think about it: there are 7 billion people on the planet, and 1.5 billion of them are on the web. But 5 billion of them have mobile phones! The reach of mobile phones is phenomenal - more than three times the reach of the internet even today.
Last Christmas more than half of all adults used their mobile phones to help them make decisions about in-store purchases. People now use mobile apps more minutes per day (94 minutes) than they browse the web (72 minutes). And we can interact with mobile devices in ways we could never interact with the web through features like touch, motion, and voice controls (welcome to my world, Siri!).
As you think about how much mobile has changed your personal life, it's barely touched how businesses operate. The current trend of "bring your own device to work" underscores how much business has not tapped the power of mobile ... workers would rather pay for and use their own devices at work than be hobbled by the current mobile options provided by their employers.
Mobile in the enterprise is unfolding in two stages: the first is improving existing business processes by mobilizing information and providing it to the employee or customer at their moment of need. For example, a salesperson walks into a client meeting carrying a mobile device equipped with all the account information, a complete order history, understanding of available inventory, and most current price list for that customer. Or a doctor has walks into an exam with all the pertinent patient information at his fingertips including x-rays, MRIs and other visual items. This acceleration of information enables faster, better decision making.
The second stage is where apps utilize all of the interactions and contextual elements that that mobile device and cloud can provide ... such as hyper-location, the customer's previous buying behavior, and the condition and location of perishable inventory. Imagine a mobile application that provides a vice president of sales a real-time performance metric of where his sales people are and their performance in the accounts they are visiting, enabling him to shift sales/pricing strategies on the fly, to close a higher percentage of business. Or imagine a packaged goods company sending a 25% off coupon to a customer who is browsing the frozen food aisle of a grocery store, encouraging them to switch from a competitor's product.
We are in the early days of companies tapping the power of mobile to improve business processes. Mobile will be even more transformative to business than the web was.
What's the future for hybrid cloud strategies?
Mobile + Cloud = More than the Sum of Their Parts
Two of the most powerful trends in technology are converging into the mobile cloud. Mobile provides massive reach through billions of devices, while the cloud offers the ability to scale quickly. The strengths of both of these elements combine to create a result that is larger than the sum of their parts ... mobile devices provide massive volumes of contextual information while the cloud is able to store, manage, and interpret this massive data.
Cloud-based services also enable enterprises to rapidly integrate functionality, such as check-ins, photos, authentication, and storage to their mobile applications, and then scale those functions rapidly. Enterprises only pay for the cloud capacity they utilize, as opposed to building up servers or storage that may lay unused for long periods of time. Given the current rapid adoption of new apps and innovation of new features, it's nearly impossible for an enterprise to plan for infrastructure to support. The cloud provides maximum and immediate flexibility to scale mobile applications.
By combining both mobile and the cloud, enterprises can transform their relationships with customers and further empower their workforces with flexible, device-optimized applications, quickly and easily.
This interview was published in SIIA's Vision from the Top, a Software Division publication released at All About the Cloud 2012.