The West Side

A West Coast Perspective on Mobility

Consumer apps should be fueled by enterprise-grade features in order to fly.

For as long as I can remember, there’s always been this notion that things that are carrier grade are better; more robust than enterprise grade, and thus more so than consumer grade. While many users would not be able to tell the difference, you have to carefully look at how these products are built. They are designed with different specifications and requirements. More recently, the major trend that’s plowing through enterprise IT is this concept called the “consumerization of the enterprise.” Simply put, it basically means that enterprise employees are becoming consumers with consumer-like expectations, usage patterns, and behaviors.

Because of this consumerization, enterprises are adopting and demanding that their technologies be more user-friendly, have consumer-esque UI, and be intuitive. I think this is a great thing. It used to be the case that the technology people used at work was the state of the art – your Windows 3.1 PC at work with a mouse versus your DOS 5.0 PC at home. Recently, it’s been your quad-core iMac at home versus your four-year-old work PC that allows you to go down the block to get a latte before the login screen comes up, and then hold a staff meeting between when you log in and when you can launch a browser. Mobility is driving the enterprise pendulum back.

But here’s the danger – some people out there think that just because we’re taking a consumer product or technology and enabling it in an enterprise setting, that enterprise features are no longer needed. Cloud computing is not running your enterprise apps in a consumer grade environment. It’s taking your enterprise apps and running it in a carrier grade environment. The fundamental robustness of the enterprise-grade or carrier-grade platform should not be discounted!

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