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June 06, 2013

IBM and AT&T Collaboration Helps Enterprises to Build Better Mobile Apps

Every year IBM holds its IBM Innovate conference. This year one of the big announcements made was that IBM and AT&T would be working together. The purpose of this collaboration is to try and get mobile apps that are more network efficient. This is accomplished by helping businesses develop and test the mobile apps.

Mobile devices afford businesses an immeasurable opportunity. That opportunity is being able to put technology where the actual work is being conducted. A quote from Compuware’s chief digital strategist is “Mobile devices set your workforce free from tethered computers.”

It is great to be able to use your mobile device when you have to work out in the field, but as we have mentioned many times in the past, what good is technology if there are no apps to make it useful? I should clarify that by saying “useful apps,” applications that work the way they are supposed to and actually accomplish something.

That is the goal behind IBM and AT&T working together. This new integration of AT&T and IBM technology is designed to give enterprises the ability to conduct comprehensive testing and analysis of their mobile apps. Network and battery usage on mobile devices can be tested. If need be, necessary changes can be quickly made. This in turn will create higher quality and better performing mobile apps.

One of the tools that will be available is AT&T’s Application Resource Optimizer (ARO). This combined with IBM’s software development solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management (CLM) will expand the development capabilities of the IBM MobileFirst strategy.

Carlton Hill, who is vice president of developer services at AT&T, made the following comments: "ARO tackles a fundamental coding challenge developers face today—finding and fixing performance and power bottlenecks that detract from a great user experience. ARO can help developers create apps that conserve battery life, load pages faster and consume network resources in a smarter way, all of which improves the customer experience."

"Businesses are challenged with the need to provide rich mobile applications, while avoiding device power and network usage pitfalls that frustrate and turn away customers,” said Kistof Kloeckner, general manager IBM Rational Software. “With today's news, we are advancing our DevOps strategy in support of better mobile application delivery."

This collaboration could solve a triple play. Business analysts will be able to plan for new requirements, developers will efficiently understand which areas need improvement concerning network and battery usage and testers will be able to more efficiently discuss defects with the operations team.

With more enterprises allowing their employees to bring their own devices to work, the need for custom mobile apps is apparent. The need to develop them quickly, efficiently and functional is also apparent. That is where this collaboration between IBM and AT&T will be a big time saver.




Edited by Ryan Sartor


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