The end of the year is getting closer every day, and that means a lot of things for the team here at App47. Certainly, it means that we’re getting excited for visiting family over the holidays and maybe—if we’re lucky—taking a few days off of work. More importantly, though, the end of the year marks a great time for New Year’s resolutions and predictions as we get closer to the fresh start that a new year brings.
In the ever-changing enterprise mobility space, the predictions we just mentioned are an important part of our product and our business strategy heading into 2015. With that in mind, we thought that now would be a good time to review our biggest predictions for trends that will matter in EMM next year. Have a look below for the 4 trends on the horizon for App47 in 2015:
- Increased SSO integration: Single sign-on integration is becoming more and more relevant every week; in-house, our new customers are requesting it as part of new deals, and our current customers are requesting that we add the capability to our current offerings for them. With continued momentum behind SSO integration, it only makes sense for us to be able to support it through the onboarding process and beyond.
- A stronger focus on security: As we mentioned in our follow-up from Enterprise Mobility Exchange 2014, app security is more top-of-mind than it’s ever been. Currently, most enterprise mobile app security takes place through MDM vendors that control data on devices or, if nothing else, at a fairly narrow scale.
As we develop new capabilities around security, we see a future focused on controlling data on a much wider spectrum of devices and on a much wider platform than through MDM. That means everything from geofencing, remote wiping, and jailbreak detection—app policies—to app actions like remote wiping data and enforcing encryption of data at rest and data in transit. Again, what we see on the horizon here at App47 is a single platform that allows you to control your data on a very large scale.
- Expanded analytics capabilities: Current app analytics, including those at App47, are very useful. The future is not with broad-based market adoption rates or even CTRs; while those are useful, they don’t tell you much about users and their usage patterns on an individual scale.
Proactive alert thresholds alert you when a certain number of events (like crashes) occur outside of your set threshold. User-centric analytics expand your capabilities even further by allowing you to remotely diagnose users’ issues and fix them, and understand in greater detail how your users are using your apps. We’re confident that the future of EMM is even more analytics-focused than it is today, and we’re planning on expanding our capabilities to suit heading into 2015.
- Greater support for ecommerce app stores: Our customer base continues to expand their needs surrounding ecommerce app stores, something that we expect to continue well into 2015—so much so that we’re adding two new capabilities in this area. One, supporting version 3 of Google’s in-app API will allow apps written on version three to be run on our platform. And two, supporting bundles will allow our customers to utilize highly specialized curated bundles that enhance user experience across the board.
Although they’re not our most requested feature, our customers are requesting ecommerce app stores frequently enough that we’re continuing to build out our to build out our capabilities to support our customers’ needs. They may be a small part of our focus now, but don’t be surprised if ecommerce app stores grow in importance in the enterprise through next year and beyond.
Every day, more and more businesses are dipping their feet in EMM as they evolve past strictly MDM strategies, and often, hastily-deployed mobile app strategies. As that happens, we expect those same businesses to seek out capabilities similar to those we discussed here.
Although we can’t predict the future, if the evolving needs of our current customers are any indication, all of the trends you see above should move directly into the spotlight as we turn the corner and head straight for another great year in 2015.
