Going Mobile with the Cloud

Many of you have been following Oracle’s recent announcements around the Oracle Cloud Platform and have realized that empowering IT to deliver mobile applications is a key priority for us. Mobile computing is also a high priority for most of our customers. Many are taking a “mobile first” approach to developing new applications, where the mobile audience is targeted in phase one rather than being an afterthought once a traditional, browser-based application is delivered. One of the many new cloud services that Oracle recently announced is the Oracle Mobile Cloud Service. It is designed from the ground up to help customers develop and deploy mobile applications quickly.

Oracle Mobile Cloud Service addresses the sweet spot of the red-hot enterprise mobile management (EMM) market with a Mobile First and API First approach. According to a recent report from 451 Research, the EMM market will grow from $3.8 billion in 2014 to $9.6 billion by 2018 with a CAGR of 22% in 2013-2018. Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) is one of the fastest growing segments of EMM.

IT management, mobile app developers and line of business (LOB) can appreciate what Oracle Mobile Cloud Service provides. The challenges that mobile development teams face on the server side often make the client side effort look easy. For line of business, Oracle Mobile Cloud Service provides deep insights on application usage, end user experience metrics to allow LOB to personalize engagements with their end users. Oracle Mobile Cloud Service helps field enterprise-wide mobile applications quickly and securely. It provides cloud-based, enterprise-class MBaaS capabilities like:

• User management
• Push notifications
• Cloud storage
• Off-line data sync
• API catalog for platform and custom APIs
• Connectors to applications that are on-premises and in the cloud
• Security services for authentication and authorization
• Monitoring and analytics

Oracle Mobile Cloud Service is client-agnostic. It can service smartphone and tablet apps written for any of the popular device platforms, such as iOS, Android and Windows. Calls from the client devices can be made either via industry-standard RESTful APIs or through the available client SDK.  

A recent CIO Magazine Tech Poll shows that this is the right time to introduce colleagues, partners and customers to how a cloud-based MBaaS can help. According to the poll:

• 33% of enterprises are actively researching mobile strategy and products, so mobile is at top of mind;
• 19% of enterprises are piloting mobile applications today, so some customers are experiencing the challenges inherent in not having a cloud-based MBaaS;
• 23% of production mobile deployments are division-wide in scope, so there are applications that may need an enterprise-class MBaaS to broaden their reach;
• Only 10% of production mobile deployments are enterprise-wide, so many customers haven’t yet committed to an MBaaS platform and can benefit from hearing about Oracle’s Mobile Cloud Service.

With Oracle Mobile Cloud Service, executing a “mobile first” strategy just got a lot easier.  For more information on Oracle’s Mobile Cloud Service, check out the video overview.

Cheers,

Tom Barrett

Tom Barrett is a cloud solutions specialist in Partner Enablement at Oracle. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of The VAR Guy's annual platinum sponsorship.