Top Trending Enterprise Apps for 2015

The enterprise application playing field of today is quite different from that of only a few years ago. So what are some of the biggest trends as we head into 2015?

Faster, Easier App Development

Adam Seligman, vice president of Developer Relations at Salesforce, commented on how every year there are new technologies that come out and capture everyone's attention. He mentioned Docker, which has the tag line "build, ship and run any app, anywhere," as an example. The latest tools for creating enterprise applications are getting easier and faster to use, he pointed out.

Enterprise Overtakes Consumer Apps

The mobile world has been dominated by consumer apps for a number of years. But Seligman senses we are seeing a reset in enterprise apps.

"The economic wave has crested on consumer apps which are baseline expectations, not huge profit engines," he said. "But apps for employees and B2B partners are a huge opportunity."

Cloud Apps Thrive

"Cloud has become the default development platform for software vendors’ enterprise applications," said Bob Muglia, CEO of Snowflake Computing. "It is also becoming the default choice for most companies’ packaged applications and is even starting to become the default choice for companies’ internal IT application development projects."

SaaS Acquisition Frenzy

Muglia takes this a stage further. He thinks there will be far fewer small software-as-a-service vendors due to an accelerating trend of acquisition of SaaS application vendors by traditional software vendors.

"Enterprise application vendors with both cloud and on-premise offerings will increasingly shift toward selling the cloud version of applications as their default sales motion because of the lower cost of delivering and supporting their cloud versions," Muglia said.

Need for Data Speed

No longer can an application depend on yesterday's data. Propelled by the consumer market’s need for speed, the enterprise app space is moving toward real-time data and real-time answers.

"One retail CIO told me that while it’s great to get a model of their customers reflecting their history, what he really needed to know is what the customers have been doing with their brands in the last 10 minutes," said Monte Zweben, CEO and co-founder of Splice Machine.

Applications that Ease Mobile Workflows

Truly productive and useful enterprise mobile apps are all about continuous business processes and workflows. For example, most users don’t want to just look up a customer and corresponding contact information, they want to look up a customer, check for suitable products, show relevant information about those products, place a purchase order for those products and send the customer a summary of that transaction.

Outsourcing Mobile App Development

It’s one thing to want all your enterprise applications available on mobile devices, fully functional and completely integrated. But it’s quite another to be able to afford the resources to create that – particularly if you have a large existing base of customers using on-premise software.

Enterprise Apps 2014

Those users and their various older versions must be maintained, which can make it difficult to free up enough talent to create the mobile tools required.

About Anna Harris:
Anna Harris working as web content writer and a strategist for a major IT firm specialized in various mobile application development services for iOS, Android, Windows Phone and other operating systems.

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