19th July 2011
A technology trend we have been monitoring at ITRS is the continued surge in popularity of smartphones and the emergence of feature-rich tablet devices. Our customers have been deploying BlackBerrys and iPhones to their users for many years, primarily as an enterprise messaging/email tool.
Recently, we have noticed an increased enthusiasm amongst customers to utilise mobile enterprise apps to complement their desktop applications. Some of our customers are embarking on innovation drives to produce proof-of-concept mobile monitoring solutions and overwhelmingly, they are keen for ITRS to deliver Geneos apps off-the-shelf for smartphones.
Within ITRS, there has been plenty of excitement amongst teams over the potential of the Geneos product on smartphones. It was highly tempting for the company to jump straight into feature development but we recognised that a strong foundation was required in order to support a healthy mobile roadmap over the next few years.
In April, we commenced a major architectural project to develop a new access/presentation layer and made this the number one priority for the development team working on visualisation. This layer will provide abstraction between our Gateways and new user interfaces, thereby supporting robust applications, simplifying the UI development process and enabling more parallel product development in the future. The layer will also provide the basis for an open API which we intend make available to our customers for their own custom application development.
Whilst the architectural foundation is being put in place, we are working in parallel on several developments including
The ease-of-deployment and ease-of-access benefits of web applications are clear to all but a key feature of Geneos Web Montage will be the highly interactive user experience. The application will include a set of configurable pages (‘Montages’) within which users can dynamically layout a set of monitoring ‘gadgets’ to suit their monitoring needs. As web browsers on smartphones have become increasingly sophisticated, Geneos Web Montage will function well on these devices. However, we ultimately see Geneos Web Montage as an application optimised for the desktop browser user.
For smartphones, our strategy is very much about targeted applications which leverage the native capabilities of the device and optimally utilise the smaller device form factor. The key is to offer a user experience which matches the device. As such, our roadmap includes plans to produce native applications for the three major platforms: iPhone, BlackBerry and Android. This of course involves utilising the respective development languages and SDKs for each platform. Ideas generated from the iPhone prototype as well as ongoing customer input will help crystalise the features delivered to these platforms.
There is of course also tablets to consider. Tablets have only just emerged in the past 12-18 months but given Apple’s success with both versions of iPad to date and the urgency from competing vendors such as Samsung (Galaxy Tab), Dell (Streak), Motorola (Xoom) and BlackBerry (Playbook) to deliver competitive alternatives, we feel that the industry’s continued investment will mean that it is only a matter of time before tablets have a significance in enterprise environments.
It is too early for us to fully define our plans for tablets but like the smartphones, our philosophy will be to provide a device-specific application, in this case, fully captialising on the touchscreen behaviour and accessible nature of the tablets. We will be paying attention to the ways in which our customers start using tablets within their environments over the next 12 months.
Quintin Gomez
ITRS - CTO
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