Mobile-First Strategy
CIO Executive Interview
Mark Sunday, CIO of Oracle Corporation, interviewed Suhas
Uliyar, Vice President of Mobile Strategy Product
Management at Oracle, to learn about the critical aspects of
a mobile-first strategy and how to maximize the
opportunities available to the enterprise.
Mark Sunday: What are the most pressing trends in the mobile
“ Many enterprises have
computing industry and how do they affect the decisions of today’s
implemented mobile applications
CIOs?
that are very tactical in nature to
solve very specific problems. This
Suhas Uliyar: Many enterprises have implemented mobile
has led to a separation by creating
applications that are very tactical in nature to solve very specific
silos between the mobile
problems. This has led to a separation by creating silos between the
architecture and what I call ‘the rest
mobile architecture and what I call “the rest of IT.”
of IT.’”
The rest of IT is focused on legacy applications and web channels.
They are motivated to deploy a common architecture for the
enterprise that standardizes access management and governance
(single sign-on, provisioning, etc.) and a services architecture that
enables reusable integration components. Mobility often arises from
other parts of the company, such as when the marketing department
hires an outside agency to build a mobile app for the public app stores.
For business-to-employee (B2E) applications, line-of-business
managers may ask IT to create high-value mobile applications for
specific functions such as field service optimization or direct store
delivery, or perhaps to create a sales application for a subset of
employees within the enterprise. But even in these implementations
the architecture is often distinct. This leads to multiple user identity
stores and mobile-specific integrations. Data resides in multiple places,
which causes issues with data integrity. In summary, many enterprises
have approached mobility as “ready, fire, aim”—not an ideal approach
to an enterprise strategy.
Mark Sunday: How has the mobile computing market changed in the
last few years?
“ The biggest changes are in the
devices themselves, which include
more advanced operating systems
Suhas Uliyar: The biggest changes are in the devices themselves,
which include more advanced operating systems with a focus on
usability. We’re also seeing big advancements in the ease with which
you can build mobile applications. Students coming out of high school
with a focus on usability. We’re also
seeing big advancements in the
ease with which you can build
mobile applications.”
and college are developing really cool apps with a plethora of tools,
from native to cross hybrid to HTML5. That’s a good thing for
consumer-only apps but it can cause chaos for enterprise IT
departments. When it comes to developing mobile apps, most CIOs
are realizing that the front-end client development is the easy part.
The complex, time-consuming, and expensive part is ensuring these
apps comply with enterprise security policies, effectively integrate with
the correct data sources in a way that is designed for mobile
applications, and securely manage the identity, business applications,
and content on the mobile device.
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Mark Sunday: What are the essential ingredients of an enterprise
mobility strategy?
Suhas Uliyar: I encourage CIOs to develop a mobile-first strategy.
Mobile apps set expectations for usability, appearance, and behavior.
When developing mobile apps, the design should consider “touch first,”
simplicity, and mobile contextual services such as location and voice.
It is important to have a multichannel and multidevice strategy. Thus,
CIOs should choose cross-platform development tools and an
integration infrastructure that can support a multichannel environment.
Having a common security infrastructure supporting multiple channels
that include the mobile device is a must.
In addition to simply adding a new interface to your existing back-end
applications, there are lots of new capabilities that mobile can offer.
It’s more than just putting a fancy front end on a legacy system, or
mashing up data from multiple sources and calling it mobile. Mobile
apps can be transformational. While most mobile apps are thought of
as extensions to the back end, I encourage enterprises to think of
mobile applications as “first-class citizens” that are not necessarily
dependent on the back end and, in some cases, do not have a back
end.
CIOs should also think about agility when it comes to mobile
innovation. Developing an effective mobile strategy begins with
understanding the role that mobile plays in the multichannel journey.
Companies can gain deeper knowledge about customer behavior as
“ Having a common security
infrastructure supporting multiple
channels that include the mobile
device is a must.”
they analyze how customers move between mobile and other
channels (for example, traditional online, e-mail, chat, voice, and
social).
Mark Sunday: I hear mobile client developers say, “I was done with
my app in a week but it took me six months to integrate it with the rest
of the IT enterprise.” How do you impose security controls and enforce
other back-end issues without stifling innovation?
Suhas Uliyar: Mobile application developers are continually looking
for new ways to accelerate the development of apps to meet their
“ Mobile back end as a service
consumers’ needs. Integrating with the back-end system adds
(MBaaS) speeds up this process in
complexity and time to the overall project. Mobile back end as a
an innovative way without
service (MBaaS) speeds up this process in an innovative way without
compromising security or
compromising security or introducing new integration complexities. It
introducing new integration
simplifies mobile application development with a standard approach to
complexities. It simplifies mobile
dealing with complex server-side programming and integration issues.
application development with a
This minimizes redundancy in back-end code blocks by providing
standard approach to dealing with
ready-to-integrate features based on standard back-end templates.
complex server-side programming
Mobile app developers can therefore focus more on the front end of
and integration issues.”
the applications, using their chosen mobile client development tools
for cross-platform hybrid apps, native development, or other
JavaScript tools. They can also utilize mobile-ready APIs exposed in
the cloud.
Mark Sunday: What are some of the technical characteristics of
MBaaS?
5
Suhas Uliyar: MBaaS provides a set of rich RESTful interfaces for all
the back-end operations required by the mobile app, abstracting these
technical details from the mobile developer. It typically includes
mobile-specific SDKs and APIs as well as common mobile services
such as offline sync, push notification, mobile data persistence, and
user management. MBaaS also provides an environment to easily
integrate to custom and third-party APIs by providing a front-end
scripting layer to existing back-end services. For example, it might use
JavaScript containers such as Node.js to build, shape, and
orchestrate services. With an MBaaS architecture, client developers
can utilize essential enterprise services without the heavy lifting
associated with back-end data management and user security.
Mark Sunday: What prevents CIOs from developing a solid mobilefirst strategy?
Suhas Uliyar: The biggest obstacle continues to involve mobile
security. There is a lack of awareness about instituting good Bring
Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, as you discussed with Amit Jasuja
in a previous interview. Other obstacles unwittingly arise from mobile
operating systems vendors who may lack an enterprise focus. For
example, many CIOs are concerned with the frequent OS updates
from Apple and Google and the consequent impact on their mobile
applications. If you have to contend with an OS update every six
months, you must consider the cost of development, deployment, and
testing. Apple and Google don’t really consider the impact of these
frequent updates on the enterprise.
Fortunately, vendors such as Oracle are stepping up and saying, “We
know about these challenges. We’ve done this for many years, and
we are helping CIOs with these issues.” For example, consider how
Oracle is mobile-enabling its packaged applications, both on-premises
systems like JD Edwards, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and [Oracle] EBusiness Suite as well as Oracle Cloud applications. We also have a
mobile-first strategy within our application teams. That means our
customers obtain enterprise-caliber mobility capabilities as part of the
package itself. They don’t have to worry about integration or security.
These mobile apps are built using Oracle Mobile Suite and secured
using Oracle Mobile Security Suite.
Mark Sunday: Can you give us a preview of Oracle Mobile Suite?
Suhas Uliyar: Oracle Mobile Suite provides tools to abstract the
application from the underlying OS, enabling “write-once, runanywhere” capabilities for mobile devices. Thus, CIOs don’t have to
deal with Apple or Google or the next big OS. They can focus on
building highly effective mobile apps that leverage their existing skill
sets in HTML5 or Java. They don’t have to go to multiple vendors for
their multichannel integration needs. They can leverage one
middleware infrastructure for their enterprise wide security and
integration needs. Oracle provides enterprise-grade reliability,
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performance, and availability to handle the high volume of traffic from
their existing web and mobile channels.
Ultimately, Oracle Mobile Suite empowers IT organizations to create
transformative applications. We’ll talk about this in our next installment.
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