Red Hat Finds That Enterprises are Stepping Up Mobile App Development

Is the enterprise market saturated with mobile technology and app development? Not yet, according to results from a new mobile maturity survey done by Red Hat, which revealed that 90 percent of respondents anticipate increasing investment in mobile application development within the next 12 months.

The 2015 Red Hat mobile maturity survey also finds that these same respondents predict their organization's investment for mobile application development increasing at an average growth rate of 24 percent during the same period.

Red Hat has been increasing its focus on the mobile space. Its mobile maturity survey follows findings from two years ago by app development platform provider, FeedHenry (acquired by Red Hat in October 2014). According to FeedHenry's 2013 survey, only seven percent of respondents from 100 U.K. companies of 1,000 or more employees indicated their organization had a fully implemented mobile app strategy. Now, 52 percent of respondents to Red Hat's 2015 survey claim to have a fully implemented strategy, signaling a rise in the importance of mobility as the pace of development accelerates. Further, respondents' organizations plan to develop on average 21 custom apps each. 

Consider that: organizations plan to develop 21 custom apps each, on average. That's a 40 percent increase over the average number of custom apps developed in the last two years.

For its survey, Red Hat commissioned research firm Vanson Bourne to poll the views of IT decision makers from 200 organizations across the United States and Western Europe. Key findings include:

The transformative power of mobile is important as organizations mature. One-third (35 percent) of respondents say mobile apps change the way they do business by reinventing business processes and an additional 37 percent say apps are primarily used to automate existing processes. Still, 24 percent of respondents are mobilizing existing web applications, showing potential for further maturity in their approaches.

More than one-third (37 percent) of respondents have instituted a collaborative Mobile Center of Excellence (MCoE). More than half (55 percent) of respondents whose organizations have an implemented and fully reviewed mobile app strategy have a MCoE in place. This can signal improved mobile maturity as IT and lines of business work together to improve workforce productivity and consumer engagement.

Organizations are embracing open source software and MBaaS technology. An overwhelming (85) percent of survey respondents say open source software is important to their app development strategy. Moreover, to tackle back-end integration, MBaaS technology is used by nearly one-third (31 percent) of respondents. This number is anticipated to grow to 36 percent in the next two years.

A new era of lightweight languages has arrived. One-quarter (26 percent) of respondents plan to primarily use Node.js as their language for back-end development within the next two years, while 15 percent plan to primarily use Java and 19 percent plan to primarily use .NET. Currently, 71 percent of respondents are primarily using Java while 56 percent use .NET.

 Cathal McGloin, vice president, Mobile Platforms, Red Hat, said:

“Organizations are realizing the importance of mobile strategies. We’re seeing a shift towards more mature practices such as collaboration across business and IT teams, as well as recognition of the importance of open source software, MBaaS technology and lightweight languages. Based on the mobility maturity survey, we anticipate mobile application development will increase over the next two years as there’s still room for mobile approaches to mature in the enterprise.”