« »

The future of mobile is multiplatform – Whitepaper

Posted December 27th, 2010 by

Smartphone evolution

Hi, I am Nazmul, President of ScreamingToaster.

As the smartphone segment continues to grow, and more consumers become accustomed to the greater capabilities delivered by these cloud connected mobile platforms, your business has to evolve as well to meet these expectations. This not a question of technology. It is a question of keeping your business competitive, and leveraging the new revenue streams that are now possible, as tens of millions of smartphone users use their devices in their daily life, and spend a lot of time, energy and money on them and through them.

Regardless of whether your business is based on technology or not, it has to evolve and take advantage of this new new delivery mechanism for experiences that can be tied to the products and services that you provide. Whether you’re a retail company, a software as a service company, a software product company, or hardware company, in order to remain competitive, you must leverage multiplatform mobile. Simply put, this means extending the reach of your products & services to user experiences that can be delivered to a variety of mobile platforms like Android, BlackBerry, and iPhone. As well as on the web, to desktop web browsers. And even to other services, via an open SDK or API. The key here is that all these experiences have to be coherent and connected in realtime.

Gone are the days when it was adequate to provide a mobile website. Or deliver some limited capability via SMS. Keep in mind that the lion’s share of growth in the smartphone segment is from people who are switching from feature phones for the first time (to get these new capabilities). Smartphone users spend a lot of money on their phones, and they spent a lot of money every month on their data plans. They expect ‘high functioning’ multiplatform mobile applications and services that use location-based services, real-time communications, and push capabilities; these are not mobile web views masquerading as mobile applications. They expect a lot from you and your mobile offerings now. Delivering any less will deliver the perception that your business is inadequate and uncompetitive, and unable to meet the demands of the “now”. Companies that can satisfy this demand, will come out ahead and reap the benefits of expanding their markets into new territories. This represents a tremendous revenue opportunity for those companies who can make multiplatform mobile a strategic goal, and not an afterthought, in order to take advantage of this new business opportunity. The key here is to take advantage of this business opportunity and avoid the substantial technological risks, and do this in a profitable way.

Cost of delivering high functioning experiences

Some people might tell you that delivering “high functioning multiplatform mobile experiences” is a very expensive undertaking and that you should deliver the least common denominator experience to your customers, as they will not know the difference. If that is how you view your customers, then you are going to pay a price for it. Hindsight is 20-20 vision, and once the race is over and you’ve lost, you don’t want to learn from your mistakes. Use an experienced partner like ScreamingToaster to help you avoid making mistakes in the first place.

We know that mobile is not your business, but you need mobile to make your business perform better. It is our business to know mobile and multiplatform. We can help you implement high functioning multiplatform mobile applications and services that use location-based services, real-time communications, and push capabilities.

I am here to tell you that you can have a compelling user experience that is multiplatform, which we can implement inexpensively at creation-time (or inception-time), and at change-time. Additionally, it is not an accurate measurement of cost just to see how much the initial cost development is. As you evolve your products and support multiple platforms, you will find that the cost of change time rapidly outpaces this initial cost. We can mitigate the high risk and cost of rolling out changes and supporting multiple platforms at change-time, as well as the initial implementation.

We can bring down the initial cost of implementation by up to 50%, and the cost of implementing change and supporting multiple platforms by 70% (which is the lion’s share of the cost incurred during the lifecycle of a mobile initiative).

Mitigating risk

We can help you with enterprise information integration by crafting a cost effective services architecture and implementation. We can help you design the user experience and workflows as well. We are a full service, one stop shop. Whether you are new to this journey, or have been on it for a few years, we can help you with our vast array of best practices, technology, and know how, to deliver your projects on time, at the best price at inception and change-time, on a single platform, or on many.

Our time tested ScreamingToaster consulting process ensures that you will gain political capital for your initiative as its being built, long before it’s even completed. You will have visibility into the entire development process; you and your management can monitor the progress of your projects, as they’re being built. So you can show iterative progress to your team members and management, and this is not a black box that hides everything with a nasty surprise at the end.

We will work with your team to gather accurate requirements, and set expectations. We will be crystal clear about how your requirements affect your budget and timeline. We build wireframes and interaction diagrams to visualize your project even before it is built, so you see at all times what we are working towards building.

Where are you on your journey?

We have worked with a large variety of customers ranging from small to large companies, with many varying requirements. However, we’ve found there are some similarities across the board that can be split into 2 factors:

  1. You are either getting into mobile for the first time, and want mobile experiences for your existing products or services to be created.
  2. Or you already have existing mobile initiatives, and need to expand your mobile experience portfolio.

In either case we can bring down the cost of development, maintenance, change, and support. We can eliminate your risk and help you accomplish your mobile objectives quickly.

BlackBerry as a target platform

Some people will tell you that BlackBerry is not a viable target platform for your mobile product in the consumer or enterprise space. However, BlackBerry does have over 40% of smartphone market share in the US, and it would be dangerous for your business to ignore these numbers. BlackBerry is the dominant player in both the consumer and enterprise space despite all the hype around iPhone.

Most consulting companies won’t touch high functioning BlackBerry mobile projects; and the few that do, charge an exorbitant sum of money to even get started. We offer the same cost savings to BlackBerry that we do the other mobile platforms. We can make BlackBerry a viable platform to port your products and services to.

The risk of silo’d development for multiplatform projects

Traditional app development involves the creation of software silos for each supported platform. It is really expensive to roll out silos; there are no incremental cost savings in supporting multiple platforms.

The integration points with IT assets are ambiguous, due to the nature of silo’d development. Tons of replication happens between silos. And finally, the underlying integration with shared IT assets causes tons of side-effects when new capabilities are added to any part of a silo. Also, it gets disproportionately more risky & costly as you add silos or make changes.

As you support multiple platforms for each app that you create, the stack of silos becomes even more unmanageable. Then, when you roll out new capabilities, it can become so expensive to update this existing stack of silos that it makes sense to roll out an entirely new stack of silos and make an entirely new app.

So, the cost at change time, affects future development as well. It’s not something that’s easily contained, and affects everything else moving forward, putting your limited budget, time, and human capital in a straight jacket

Eliminating the risk of multiplatform development

It isn’t easy to hire mobile multiplatform experts as they are in exceptionally short supply. You don’t want to hire a group of greenhorn mobile developers as full time employees, to roll out your mobile initiatives, and have them learn on the job, on your dime.

Leverage our skills, expertise, best practices and vast knowledge in multiplatform mobile. We have been doing this for over a decade. You can hire us for a fraction of the cost of hiring a full-time staff of 60 or even six people.

We can bring down the initial cost of implementation by up to 50%, and the cost of implementing change and supporting multiple platforms by 70% (which is the lion’s share of the cost incurred during the lifecycle of a mobile initiative).

Outsource without risk – join us

We have helped many companies, large and small, with their multiplatform mobile initiatives. We have rescued them from the painful experience of dealing with cheap outsourcing vendors both local and international. Cheap outsourcing (to the lowest bidder) might look good on paper, but not when you factor in the inevitable redo (and the risk & cost & political damage associated with that eventuality). We are a better choice than selecting cheap outsourcing (at home and abroad):

  1. We are cost effective – 50% cost reduction @ inception-time & 70% cost reduction @ change-time, when compared to in-house development.
  2. We have capabilities, experience, and proven track record that they don’t have around high functioning multiplatform development.
  3. We are on the same timezone as our customers in the US, because we are also in the US.
  4. We don’t have a communications barrier. We also manage expectations and provide complete visibility into our process; we understand the demands and evaluation criteria of corporate America.
  5. We create visualizations for you on everything we work on; we do this iteratively so that you can see what you are getting as were building it; there are no nasty surprises at the end.
  6. You can gain political capital with your management team (as we are working on your project) long before it is even completed.
  7. We run one of the highest quality and most relevant open-source developer training websites in the world (started in 1997). We have been enabling developers to do great real-world things for a very long time. We are passionate about what we do, and believe you are what you do. We have been giving back to the community for over a decade and are staunch proponents of the open source movement. Not many companies can say that, much less most consulting companies.
  8. Learn about the accolades that we have received for our product development. We are a consulting company that knows exactly what we are talking about, since we have been through it all ourselves, in building, marketing, supporting, and selling our own products.
  9. Learn more about how we create open source technology to make better applications for our consulting clients, using our Zen Application Framework (Apache 2.0 license). We don’t just use SDKs & toolkits, we are the ones creating them!

Choosing us gives you the best of all worlds:

  1. working with an experienced partner,
  2. working with an American company,
  3. and getting the greatest cost savings on outsourcing your high functioning multiplatform projects.

Join us, and make “Made in America” mean something, once again!

Thanks for reading,

Nazmul, President, ScreamingToaster

 

Comments are closed.