Don’t gamble with your company’s future…Mobile Enterprise Application
Platforms turn the odds for mobile success directly in your favor.
Building a Major Mobile App?Without a MEAP the odds of success will spiral rapidly out of control.
•WhatExactlyisaMEaP?
•sOsintErnatiOnal- MObilitysavEslivEs
•EatOn-iPadsvs.30POundsOfcatalOgs
A S u p p l e m e n t t o m o b i l e e n t e r p r i S e m A g A z i n e
MobileEnterpriseMag.com january/fEbruary 2012 Mobile enterprise | MEAP3
There is no question that mobil-
ity has taken over the enter-
prise. Whether in the office,
out in the field or reaching out
to consumers, mobile devices - but
more importantly, the mobile apps
that make those devices useful - have
become central to all business opera-
tions. The device side of the equation
remains a Wild West affair, with BYOD
continuing without end. Enterprises
won’t have any luck trying to control
smartphones, though we can anticipate
much more control in the long run over
emerging tablet environments.
Mobile applications, however, are
another thing entirely. Any business
can exert complete control over mobile
apps, especially those large scale mobile
applications that will - or already do -
serve as strategic corporate initiatives.
We’ll see two very important examples
of mobile applications driving strategic
enterprise initiatives a bit further on in
this story when we turn our attention
to Eaton and SOS International, two
large scale organizations that required
two very different approaches to build-
ing their major mobile applications.
Despite their different needs and
business requirements, both companies
had one thing in common - they both
utilized a “mobile enterprise applica-
tion platform” - or MEAP - to build their
mobile apps. It is not possible to build
state of the art mobile enterprise ap-
plications without the use of one. Many
What Exactly is a MEaP?ThE MOBIlE EnTErPrISE APPlIcATIOn PlATfOrM - YOur kEY MEAnS
to a sure mobile bet. • By tony rizzo
INTRODUCTION
MeAp3 What exactly is a MeAp?
CASE STUDY
MeAp7 international sosHow to Deliver a Global, Cross-Platform Mobile application
CASE STUDY
MeAp12 powersource Eaton's Mobile app Takes iPads Deep into the field
Mobile Enterprise Application Platform
iOS
Android
Windows Phone 7
BlackBerry OS and PlayBook
Win CE Embedded
Feature Phones
Win 8 Tablets
Win 7 Laptops
Enterprise and Consumer Mobile Users
Native
Hybrid(Native + HTML5)
HTML5
Web Only(Browsers)
User Authentication
Back End Data Connectors
Session Management
Transaction Management
Transaction/App Analytics
Secure Communications Gateway
Data Encryption
Databases
App Servers
Web Services
Legacy Apps
Screen and HTML Scrapers
Integrated Design and User Interface Studio Standalone or Eclipse/Windows Plugins
MO
BIL
E A
PP
LIC
AT
ION
S
W
Cloud-based Services
Platform
have tried, and most have failed - at
significant development and developer
cost, and in lost time.
When an enterprise sets out to cre-
ate a strategic new mobile application,
it simply cannot afford to gamble with
the potential for failure. There are too
many stakeholders, many of them with
cxO titles, who have a great deal on the
line - failure is not an option, and speed
to market is essential. Without a MEAP
you would have better luck and better
odds of success at the roulette table than
succeeding with your mobile project.
Why? consider the MEAP diagram
shown on page 20.
It represents the core features of any
enterprise grade MEAP. On the outside
edges you have the end user commu-
nity for your mobile app, and you have
all of the back end data and application
sources those users need secure access
to. Security requires many things, but
the first line of defense is data encryp-
tion and a 100% secure communication
capability to your end users. Without
a MEAP these two issues alone would
present a significant challenge, but the
greatest challenge - at least in terms of
developer cost and time - is the back
end connectivity puzzle.
An enterprise grade MEAP will re-
duce both the time and complexity of
establishing back end connectivity. Typi-
cally the development resources needed
here if an IT team wanted to do a project
in-house would require significant ex-
table ofcontents
Building a Major MoBile app?
MEAP4 | Mobile enterprise january/fEbruary 2012 MobileEnterpriseMag.com
user interface experience, and whether
the MEAP has the ability to support
hTMl5 and hybrid (native + hTMl5) ap-
plications. These, among others, are all
points of evaluation that will depend
on the requirements of the mobile ap-
plication being deployed.
Other components of a MEAP in-
clude the ability to provide analytics on
app usage, including very granular in-
formation; some mobile device manage-
Building a Major MoBile app?
perience (and great cost). A MEAP will
greatly reduce both back end complexity
and time to execution by approximately
75% compared to in-house efforts. Wire-
less data encryption is also fully handled
by the MEAP - connectivity to and from
your mobile end users when utilizing a
MEAP will be as “state of the art secure”
as is humanly possible to achieve.
The heart of the MEAP is its applica-
tion design and development capabili-
ties. All MEAPs differ in their technical
approaches - some allow extensive
visual drag and drop, some employ a
table-driven approach, and some re-
quire additional coding. The level of
customization that an app may require
(depending on how complex its overall
design is) and the ability of the MEAP
to handle that customization and com-
plexity will typically be a key criteria in
evaluating a MEAP.
The application design studio is
also the component that determines
a MEAP’s ability to deliver true “write
once, deploy to any” capabilities,
whether the MEAP can easily deliver
true native (yet highly customizable)
code, can deliver a true cross-device
What Exactly is a MEaP?
The heart of the MEAP is its application design and development capabilities. It is here that the end user experience is defined and executed.
Mobile Enterprise Application Platform
iOS
Android
Windows Phone 7
BlackBerry OS and PlayBook
Win CE Embedded
Feature Phones
Win 8 Tablets
Win 7 Laptops
Enterprise and Consumer Mobile Users
Native
Hybrid(Native + HTML5)
HTML5
Web Only(Browsers)
User Authentication
Back End Data Connectors
Session Management
Transaction Management
Transaction/App Analytics
Secure Communications Gateway
Data Encryption
Databases
App Servers
Web Services
Legacy Apps
Screen and HTML Scrapers
Integrated Design and User Interface Studio Standalone or Eclipse/Windows Plugins
MO
BIL
E A
PP
LIC
AT
ION
S
W
Cloud-based Services
Platform
Building a Major MoBile app?
consideration. Businesses looking to mo-
bilize internal processes and business
functions may choose to look at a MEAP
that provides pre-built application mod-
ules that can be both quickly assembled
as needed yet remain customizable.
Sybase’s unwired Platform, for ex-
ample, provides this exact capability.
“Mobilizing businesses' processes and
tasks has emerged as a top priority on
both business and IT agendas, and mo-
mentum will only accelerate in 2012,”
notes David Tong, VP of Engineering
for Sybase. “Enterprises are targeting
a broad set of mobile apps, including
feature-rich, full-functioning business
apps, and light-weight, task-based
apps. Independent of the scenario, it is
important that the in-house develop-
ment team is empowered by a robust
mobile application platform that com-
plements their skill set, be it in a hybrid
Web container or native application en-
vironment. It is also important that the
platform includes both development
tools and the run-time capability.”
The bottom line is this: When your
company - whether a fortune 500 play-
er or a small SMB - decides the time has
arrived to drive strategic mobile initia-
tives, the very first partner that must
be considered is the MEAP vendor that
will work with you to create, deliver
and deploy the mobile apps that are at
the center of your strategic game plans.
careful evaluation and consideration
of your MEAP partner will turn what
would otherwise be an unnecessary
risky gamble into a sure thing. //
Visit our Web site at www.mobileenter-
prisemag.com for additional resources,
including:
• the top ten Questions a meaP Ven-
dor Must Answer for You
finally, the MEAP's own server and
the connections it makes to back end
systems should be able to be based ei-
ther on-premise behind a corporate
firewall, or up in the cloud. The cloud
can be a network operations center
- or nOc - that is directly supported
by the MEAP vendor, or it can be one
contracted through a wireless services
provider, such as AT&T or Verizon.
Evaluation CritEriaA key evaluation point depends on
the type of mobile application being
developed. A consumer-facing mobile
app will have different requirements
than an app needed out in the field.
As Johann Poppenbeck, VP, Product
Management for DSI, a veteran MEAP
vendor, says, “When your mobile app is
used out in the field, rather than in an
office environment, it is critical to en-
sure that your development platform
delivers apps that function regardless
of device, location or network connec-
tivity. It is also important that your plat-
form accommodates situations where
a device is used by multiple users who
serve different roles and potentially
speak different languages. finally, the
platform will ideally provide an inter-
face that is optimized for the mobile
device and specific end user workflows,
rather than a browser version of the
interface seen at the desk.”
A MEAP’s “ecosystem” of applica-
tion support may also prove to be a key
ment services; and the ability to push out
updates and upgrades over the air to
provision or re-provision mobile devices.
There are two additional major ca-
pabilities a MEAP must provide. The
first is a strong session management
capability. Mobile users will not al-
ways find themselves in locations that
provide connectivity to their mobile
devices. In many cases a user must be
able to continue to work offline when
a connection is lost or dropped. And
users should never explicitly know or
be aware that they are, in fact, work-
ing offline.
As soon as a connection reappears
the application must log itself back on
to the back ends it was using prior to a
disconnect, and elegantly re-connect, re-
establish communications and immedi-
ately update all services and data on both
the back end and on the mobile user's
device. Other data that may be available,
such as GPS-driven location information,
also needs to be preserved and re-utilized
once a connection is re-established.
An enterprise grade MEAP must also
deliver a strong transaction manage-
ment capability. A transaction manager
must effectively maintain the integrity of
all data that is being consumed and used
by the mobile app and the mobile user.
The transaction manager works hand in
hand with the session manager to ensure
that a user's work maintains data integ-
rity across the board - before, during,
and after a disconnect-reconnect occurs.
MEAP6 | Mobile enterprise january/fEbruary 2012 MobileEnterpriseMag.com
The first partner that must be considered is the MEAP vendor that will work closely with you to deliver your strategic mobile game plans.
What Exactly is a MEaP?
services - that means, specifically, that
they feel safe and secure.”
For many years the “user interface”
that SOS provided its users was a wal-
let-size card with a collection of phone
numbers a customer would be able to
reliably depend on to call in any emer-
gency and wherever they might be. Ten
years ago the plastic card gave way to an
electronic card, which has been the norm
up until 2011. Daniel points out that “our
user statistics from 2010 showed that 80
percent of our end user customers have
smartphones. Given that, we began to
consider the range of service possibilities
that putting an SOS mobile application
on those phones would bring to our cus-
tomers and users. Not to mention the
benefits to SOS in terms of delivering
new service capabilities.”
SOS had “a smart developer in
house who pulled together a team
of three and built a BlackBerry-based
prototype of the mobile app we spec’d
out during our mobile brainstorming
sessions,” Daniel says. As is usually the
case when mobile technology is used
to deliver a strategic new enterprise
capability, SOS’s CEO, Arnaud Vaissié,
immediately became involved with the
project and as soon as the app was on
his BlackBerry he demanded that SOS
immediately get it out to the field.
illness, accident, or civil unrest. To deliv-
er these capabilities International SOS
works in partnership with businesses,
governments and non-governmental
organizations, and offers international
standards of medical care.
Although its customers are Fortune
500 businesses, its “clients” are the mil-
lions of employees those companies con-
tract with International SOS to protect
during their travels. Notes Tim Daniel,
Group Executive Vice President for SOS,
“We refer to SOS as a ‘business to busi-
ness to consumer’ organization. Our cus-
tomers are large global entities, includ-
ing 80 of the Fortune 100, but the actual
users of our services are the employees
of our customers, and we treat them as
consumers. We need to meet their needs
and ensure they are satisfied with our
International SOS is a global
company with 10,000 employ-
ees that include 970 full-time
physicians and 200 security spe-
cialists. It offers integrated medical,
clinical, security, and customer care so-
lutions to primarily large organizations
with international operations. It pro-
vides planning, preventative programs,
in-country expertise, and emergency
response services to 66 percent of For-
tune Global 500 companies.
The company runs an international
operation spanning 70 countries, and
a worldwide network of alarm centers,
clinics, and health and logistics pro-
viders. A key aspect of the company’s
overall services is that it offers local-
ized expertise, preventative advice, and
emergency assistance during critical
International SOS — Mobility Saves Lives!INTErNATIONAl SOS AND ITS MEAP PArTNEr VErIVO SOFTWArE SErVE
up a global app • By tony rizzo
80% of Inter-national SOS's many users own smartphones
<< International SOS's Mobile Membership App - one code base, three major mobile platforms
MobileEnterpriseMag.com jAnuAry/fEbruAry 2012 Mobile enterprise | MEAP7
Building a Major MoBile app?
effective agile development and de-
ployment capabilities, allowing mobile
developers to easily build cross-plat-
form apps quickly and push changes to
native applications in real-time. Inter-
national SOS needs to be able to add
significant new functionality to new
releases of the app quickly - and that is
a direct match for our platform.”
Great experiences, no GamblesSOS had an advantage in building the
mobile applica-
tion in that it had the BlackBerry pro-
totype and user feedback in hand to
guide the application design process.
Back end connectivity was easily estab-
lished, freeing the development team
to focus on the end user experience and
to ultimately design an application that
works extremely well across all three
platforms. The original internal Black-
Berry team had already created a set of
Web services to use with their original
BlackBerry application. Once Verivo
came on board it was a simple process
to upgrade the Web services to deliver
the performance required by the app to
ensure a crisp user experience.
had to use a MEAP for development in
order to be able to easily create, deploy,
maintain and deliver across a broad
range of devices (keeping in mind that
BlackBerry, Apple and Android all come
in numerous OS flavors). The company
also initially wanted native device appli-
cation support (for example, extensive lo-
calized services required a tight coupling
to a device’s GPS capabilities. HTMl5 is in
the roadmap for future releases.
After an initial review of available
platforms that met their criteria the
team narrowed its choices down to
three finalists and then proceeded to
put each through a rigorous evaluation
process. After a three month evalua-
tion process the team ended up select-
ing Verivo Software, formerly known
as Pyxis Mobile, for a combination of
reasons, key among them: full cross-
platform capability, full native device
capability, the cost model and structure
involved, and the ability to bring the
platform in-house and wean SOS fully
off of any professional services devel-
opment assistance in the long term.
Daniel adds, “The overall philosophy
of Verivo was also a critical intangible
for us - when we met with their man-
agement team it was clear we had a
philosophical meeting of the minds.”
Todd Christy, a Verivo founder and
its CTO adds, “Our philosophy has
always been to deliver a highly cost-
As soon as both our customers and
our users got a look at the new mobile
application they immediately began
to ask where the iPhone and Android
versions were. “The handwriting was
on the wall as soon as we put the appli-
cation into the field,” says Daniel. “Al-
though the larger population of users
were on BlackBerry devices, essentially
all of our customers knew that iPhone
and Android demand would grow at
an exponential rate as soon as the app
was discovered. BYOD has everything
to do with this.”
“Yes,” Daniel says, “we did initially
attempt to port the BlackBerry app over
to the iPhone with our team. It became
immediately clear - crystal clear in fact
- that this would be a very painful pro-
cess and was not going to work. We
needed to move the app from essential-
ly a prototype to what we knew would
become a sophisticated and complex
mobile application. We brought in an
experienced mobile development man-
ager and set him the task of solving our
need for a write once and easily deploy
to many solution.” Arnaud Vaissié, the
CEO, made moving ahead quickly easy
by being highly supportive but also
through approving significant funding
for the project, which Vaissié sees as a
vital investment for SOS’s future.
The mobile team quickly narrowed
the solution set down - it was clear they
MEAP8 | Mobile enterprise jAnuAry/fEbruAry 2012 MobileEnterpriseMag.com
The overall philosophy of Verivo Software was a critical intangible for us — when we met with their management team it quickly became clear that we had a philosophical meeting of the minds.
International SOS — Mobility Saves Lives!
>> Tim Daniel, Group Executive Vice President, International SOS - "Our mobile app has had a major impact on our business."
Building a Major MoBile app?
application has been enormously well-
received, and I can say with a great
deal of confidence that mobility really
does save lives!”
Discovery by the largest number of
users possible is important because the
International SOS mobile application
will be sending back critical applica-
tion information behind the scenes
from users out in the field - commu-
nication is bi-directional, and being
able to easily set this up is a primary
MEAP requirement (and a key evalu-
ation criteria). SOS will be investing
more heavily in back end Web services
design as the app evolves and sends
more data back and forth. The Verivo
platform makes this process relatively
easy, though there is no way to com-
pletely avoid a fair amount of complex
design effort. The key is to be able to
eliminate 80% of the effort so that
the remaining 20% gets the necessary
quality attention from the develop-
ment teams - which SOS will draw from
its in-house resources.
Finally, as the app is discovered
not only by end users, but as well by
SOS’s business customers, partners,
and its own internal workforce, there
is already a “significant rising demand
for more mobile apps of every sort,
including mobile apps on tablets,”
says Daniel. “With our Verivo rela-
tionship firmly cemented, and with
our own in-house expertise quickly
growing in maturity, I believe we are
in a great place - we’re ready to ex-
ecute on our mobile road map, and
we’re confident we’ll continue to get
our mobile apps done on time, on
budget and with great user interface
experiences. But there is no doubt
that it is the MEAP that is, ultimately,
the great enabler here.” //
wherever our users happen to be and
who are extraordinarily knowledge-
able of that local landscape.” That
said, it is already becoming quite clear
to Daniel and his business and technol-
ogy teams that they will need to make
the move to developing tablet-based
mobile applications.
Tablets open up more opportunities.
Daniel's teams made the decision to fo-
cus specifically on native mobile phone
applications in order to take advantage
of all available features at the deepest
possible level. With tablets however,
the dynamics change. First, the need for
native apps is far less important, and it
opens the door to using HTMl5. Tablet
applications will likely be used by SOS's
workforce, and their needs are likely
going to be centered more directly on
Web-based applications. Says Daniels,
“When we are ready to take the next
step and begin adding HTMl5-based
tablet apps, we already know that Ve-
rivo will be there to provide the MEAP
support we'll need. Eventually we'll
also look at building additional smart-
phone applications that will probably
end up as hybrid HTMl5 plus native
mobile apps. Verivo will be there for
that as well.”
As the application is discovered SOS
has seen its use grow exponentially. So
far the ability of the app to scale on
the back end to support those users
has been a non-issue. Daniel does say
that even with hundreds of thousands
of downloads there is much deploy-
ment left to deliver on - when mem-
berships and total users push into the
seven figure range as they do with
International SOS, making sure that all
users find the application sooner than
later is an exercise SOS is now pushing.
Nevertheless, Daniel says that, “the
The new application, simply called
Membership App, is shown running
on each platform on page 23. Aside
from a few minor mobile operating
system-specific issues, it is clearly the
same application - and the same look,
feel and functionality - running on all
three mobile devices.
Daniel points out that through the
use of Verivo’s platform, “develop-
ment proved quick and efficient. We
did make use of Verivo’s professional
services team - but that was our choice
as we needed to have the application
out the door in November. From start
to finish, from our initial search for the
right mobile development platform, to
our formal engagement with Verivo, to
a finished mobile app whose simplicity
of operation masks a complex piece
of software, that was deployed across
three distinct mobile platforms was ap-
proximately a seven month project.”
Daniel adds, “We made our CEO
happy and met our deadlines, but most
significantly we met them without hav-
ing to cut a single corner - Verivo’s MEAP
took all the risks out of a development
process that would otherwise have prov-
en a significant gamble for us.”
next steps“International SOS developed the
Membership App specifically for the
smartphone environment. The reason
we focused religiously on the smart-
phone is something that is often for-
gotten in the great rush to build mo-
bile applications - the second word in
smartphone is…phone!” says Daniel.
“The ability to make a call still remains
the number one most effective means
for any of our end users, no matter
where they are, to reach a safety net
- our operators, who are both local to
MEAP10 | Mobile enterprise jAnuAry/fEbruAry 2012 MobileEnterpriseMag.com
International SOS — Mobility Saves Lives!
MEAP12 | Mobile enterprise january/february 2012 MobileenterpriseMag.com
Says Stager, “We knew we needed
to significantly reduce the entire sales
cycle. The only way to do so was to
put all the information the Eaton field
teams require at their fingertips at the
immediate point of contact for any sales
opportunity - no matter how complex or
involved that information might be. The
goal was to reduce the sales cycle from
what had been ‘days and sometimes
weeks’ to, ideally, the day of initial en-
gagement with a customer or prospect.”
It was clear to Stager that the com-
pany had to take a major mobile leap
and needed to completely automate its
entire field sales process for its more than
400 sales representatives and network of
distributors and channel partners. From
his position - which bridges between and
encompasses the viewpoints of both the
business and technology sides of Eaton’s
industrial sector teams - Stager put to-
gether an initial early game plan in mid-
2010 to tackle the problem.
The basic parameters that needed
to be met are as follows: the mobile
application had to be able to deliver the
entire Eaton collection of catalogs and
manuals; it had to allow easy access to
Industrial manufacturer Eaton
Corporation had an interest-
ing problem. The company
produces state of the art indus-
trial equipment, but also has an exten-
sive overall product line that includes
countless products that have been
around for many years.
For as long as anyone can remem-
ber Eaton’s distributors and field sales
representatives have been using exten-
sive collections of printed manuals that
they’ve lugged around in the trunks of
their cars forever. In addition to carry-
ing around printed manuals, the typical
sales process included taking extensive
notes, then heading back to the office
to carry out typically extensive data en-
try into Eaton’s back end systems. From
the time an Eaton field representative
made initial contact with either an exist-
ing customer or a prospect, many days
would then elapse before the rep would
be ready to reconnect with a proposal
for a deal or to actually close a sale.
Eaton’s competitors are in the same
boat, and in 2010 Eaton realized that
there were two possible roads to its
field sales future: either Eaton could
take a strategic leap to gain a strong
competitive advantage, or it could let
a competitor do so instead. Eric Stager,
Program Manager, Web and Mobile,
Industrial Sector for Eaton, knew the
answer to which road Eaton needed to
take - it was, in fact, a no-brainer.
all of those materials in a clean and visu-
ally strong manner; it needed to ensure
that all information on over 200,000
hydraulic products - especially pricing
information - was entirely up to date;
it needed to allow sales reps to craft
proposals and notes and to capture
all required data for simple back end
download at the point of sales contact;
it needed to allow easy order entry;
and the app had to work under a true
anytime, anywhere set of conditions.
Uninterrupted anywhere, anytime
access is critical. The field reps typically
operate in environments with unstable
and unreliable 3G services and little
or no WIFi access, meaning that the
ability to transparently work offline
would be essential to the design of
the mobile app. A field rep needed to
have access to the entire working app
at every point in the sales process, from
initial contact, through all discussions,
to the end of a meeting, and needed
to be able to capture all data whether
wirelessly connected or not.
With these initial parameters in mind,
Stager and his team pulled together an
initial prototype for a mobile app, run-
ning on an iPad, and targeted showing
this prototype at the company’s Fall 2010
Eaton Distributor Meeting (EDM) event
in September 2010 - a large scale affair
with large numbers of participants. Stag-
er recalls, “There were over a thousand
global Eaton channel partners and repre-
sentatives and our simple and relatively
crude mobile prototype captured their
If you don’t know it’s an iPad you are looking at you would easily be fooled into thinking that PowerSource is a substantial laptop application.
eaton's PowerSource — Taking iPads into the fieldEATon FIGUrED ITS FIElD SAlES TEAMS WoUlD PrEFEr IPADS To lUGGInG
30 pounds of manuals around. It was rIght. • By tony rizzo
Building a Major MoBile app?
MobileenterpriseMag.com january/february 2012 Mobile enterprise | MEAP13
imaginations entirely. We received over-
whelming ‘Voice of Customer’ feedback
at the event from a variety of channels -
one-on-one discussions, surveys, and col-
laborative workshops - demanding that
Eaton make the app an urgent priority.”
Stager continues, “The Eaton
leadership team saw this feedback in
person, and the idea sold itself - with
overwhelming user demand, and our
management team instantly coming on
board and adding their own demands
for delivery as well as the necessary fi-
nancial resources, we suddenly found
ourselves in full production mode - with
the only question remaining to be an-
swered being: how the heck were we
actually going to do this?”
A SubStAntiAl Mobile AppThe project quickly grew into a signifi-
cant effort. Stager counts 10 external
partners - including user design teams,
an external testing team, a validation
and QoS team, a team to digitize its en-
tire catalog base and other print-based
collateral, a database team, and an inter-
nal Eaton team of 40 coming together to
deliver the mobile app, which eventually
became known as PowerSource. At this
point in time Stager’s rapidly growing
team knew it also needed to bring in a
major MEAP vendor.
The mobile app, in Eaton’s case, was
defined not by an immediate need for
cross mobile platform development or
the need to write once and deploy to
many - a typical MEAP requirement (al-
though this is a key requirement for next
versions of PowerSource), but was rather
defined by a great deal of both back end
and user interface complexity. The ver-
sion of PowerSource that would repre-
sent its initial deployment was massive
in scope in terms of its mobile ambitions,
and the Eaton team knew it was going
to initially be an iPad app that needed to
take full advantage of iPad’s capabilities.
Stager says that Eaton did a deep
dive with four MEAP vendors and ulti-
mately chose Antenna Software and its
platform due to its level of maturity in
the space, its ability to initially deliver
on iPad and be able to deploy easily to
other versions when user demand dic-
tates that need in the future, the ability
to effectively translate the defined user
interface (a key component of the app
for Eaton), the ability to help Eaton de-
ploy the app’s enormous store of data
in the cloud, and for its professional
services team, which demonstrated it
could deliver a complex mobile app
within an aggressive timeline.
Jim Somers, CMo at Antenna, notes,
"When Eaton first asked us to look at
their mobile app idea it was instantly
clear to us that professional services
would play a significant role because
what they were attempting to do with
PowerSource is ground-breaking - and
candidly pushed the envelope of what
is truly possible with the technology.
The amount of product data and up-
dates - including interactive 3-D prod-
uct demos - being pushed from the
cloud to the device was unprecedented.
> PowerSource puts a great deal of application power in the hands of eaton’s field sales teams and distributors.
< Sophisticated video capabilities, among many other features, deliver a powerful competitive edge directly at the point of customer contact.
The app takes advantage of the
iPad’s mobile strengths - easy portability,
portrait and landscape viewing modes,
and multi-pane touch navigation. In par-
ticular, user adoption - a specific goal
for Stager and his team, is not an issue.
Both Apple’s and the iPad’s popularity
and cachet ensure user adoption. “What
would you rather have,” asks Stager,
“thirty pounds of catalogs in your trunk
or a cool iPad 2 running PowerSource?”
next StepSFrom concept to completed mobile proj-
ect, PowerSource required just a little
over a year to spec out, design, build,
test and deploy. Antenna’s development
resources were critical to PowerSource
launching under such a timeframe. A
next step for Eaton - which has a sub-
stantial IT team in-house - is to start
learning the ropes of mobile applica-
tion development. Stager believes that
“this goal is clearly a long term project.
It won’t happen overnight by any stretch
of the imagination. But it will happen
over the course of the next 24 months.”
As with any project that meets its
goals and demonstrates a clear strate-
gic advantage, not only is the hydrau-
lics division of Eaton already looking
ahead to its next mobile applications,
but other major divisions of Eaton have
also taken notice of PowerSource’s suc-
cess and are lining up their own mo-
bile strategies. Mobile development
will eventually become a core Eaton IT
competency. But as Stager also points
out, “whether it is Antenna or anoth-
er MEAP partner down the road, the
MEAP will continue to play a key and
central role in all of our mobile devel-
opment efforts. It is the key mobile tool
for keeping the odds of mobile app
success squarely in our favor.” //
and that team’s ability to effectively de-
liver the app as specified by both back
end and user interface requirements
defined outside of Antenna itself, were
critical to Eaton’s ability to deliver the
app on a timely basis.”
Says Stager, “If you didn’t know
you were looking at an iPad screen you
would easily be fooled into thinking this
was a substantial desktop application
- and that, in a nutshell, was the real
challenge for us - because ultimately we
and our partners have in fact developed
a substantial and strategic application
that is inherently mobile. Its mobility is
what provides the strategic and com-
petitive advantage.” That the app was
completed in a year is remarkable.
PowerSource was formally launched
in november 2011. Incidental to Pow-
erSource’s creation, it also turns out
that PowerSource is also one of the
first to be included in Apple’s new Vol-
ume Purchasing Program (VPP) for B2B
apps. PowerSource delivers 3-D parts
modeling, promotional and training
videos, pricing configurations, tech-
nical specifications, competitor cross
references, and much more. All of this is
handled through a set of sophisticated
user interfaces, each designed to serve
a particular type of data requirement.
They had an aggressive vision and very
aggressive timeline for completion, and
mobile experts were required to make
that vision a reality.”
When PowerSource is deployed to a
user, there is a data store of over 6 GB
of data that is also downloaded with
the application. Every week Antenna’s
server pushes gigabytes of updates to
every user of PowerSource over the air
- a critical piece of the app. As Stager
puts it, “Antenna demonstrated to us a
maturity that other MEAP vendors lack
relative to our ability to deliver both
a complex mobile app and the huge
amount of data that is part and parcel
of the mobile app.”
Somers adds, “Antenna’s ability to
run Eaton’s app in our cloud is vital to
the success of the Eaton deployment
because Eaton doesn’t have to worry
about standing up and maintaining the
mobile operating environment. rather
than worrying about these infrastruc-
ture issues Eaton can focus instead on
what is strategic to their business.”
With user interface specifications
and database and back end connectiv-
ity requirements in hand as developed
through Eaton’s other vendor partner-
ships for the project, Antenna then pro-
ceeded to write the entire application
for Eaton. Says Stager, “Antenna’s ability
to make the necessary mobile app de-
velopment resources available to Eaton,
MEAP14 | Mobile enterprise january/february 2012 MobileenterpriseMag.com
eaton's PowerSource — Taking iPads into the field
The MEAP is the key mobile tool for keeping the odds of mobile app success at Eaton squarely in our favor.
>> eric Stager, Program Manager, Web and Mobile, Industrial Sector for eaton
Building a Major MoBile app?
MEAP16 | Mobile enterprise january/february 2012 MobileenterpriseMag.com
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