4 Keys to Building a Successful, Scalable Mobile App Strategy

APPCELERATOR WHITEPAPER: 4 STEPS TO CREATING A MOBILE STRATEGY 4 Keys to Building a Successful, Scalable Mobile App Strategy Mobile is already changing everything, it will transform relationships with customers and employees alike. How can you best enable this to happen? How can you build a long term, sustainable mobile strategy? At Appcelerator, we help the world s biggest and best comanies create and execute mobile strategies on our Titanium platform. appcelerator.com 1 2012 APPCELERATOR, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 1 2011 APPCELERATOR, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Table of Contents The Mobile Opportunity Faster, bigger, and significantly more complex than the web...3 A Model From the Web Exploration, Acceleration, Transformation...4 Case Study Mobile Innovation at NBC and PwC...6 Step 1 Decide how you want to interact with your mobile user...5 Step 2 Prioritize your audience...7 Step 3 Choose a scalable development technology...8 Step 4 Manage your app lifecycle...10 2012 APPCELERATOR, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2

The Mobile Opportunity Faster, bigger, and significantly more complex than the web The web revolution created the next generation of giants companies like Google, Amazon, and ebay went from nothing to multi-billion dollar market caps in less than a decade. Today, mobile is helping fuel a new generation of giants companies like Instagram, Square, and Zynga, have reached billion+ dollar valuations in half the time of their predecessors and all without an IPO. The mobile revolution will be like its web predecessor with two important exceptions: Companies now have a window of opportunity to think about how mobile can empower their business as radically as the web did. By making mobile a part of their overall IT strategy, companies can transform their relationships with their customers, employees, and partners in even greater ways than they did with the web. MOBILE Mobile will be larger with 5.5 million mobile devices versus 1.1 million internet connected computers. Mobile will be more personal than the web because devices are personal and apps are all about the user. Mobile is significantly more complex because there is no single dominant operating system. The race is on. WEB The initial effects of this mobile revolution are already being felt. With more than 60 million devices sold, the ipad single-handedly validated the tablet market. Apple s massive success with the iphone and ipad has upended established mobile giants like RIM, Nokia, Microsoft, and Motorola. Companies are now enabling employees to bring their own devices (BYOD) into the workplace a concept that would have been unheard of just a few years ago and the increasing trend of "bring your own application" (BYOA) is forcing enterprises to re-evaluate mobile app projects, and refocus on UI/UX. 2012 APPCELERATOR, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 3 3 2011 APPCELERATOR, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

A Model From the Web Exploration, Acceleration, Transformation Remember the first generation of websites? They were basically informational sites that put the company s brochureware on the web. Companies took what they already had sales collateral and hired a consultant who knew HTML to create web pages that could be accessed by anyone who had a computer. In the web world, this was the exploration phase. Once companies figured out how to make information accessible on the web, they then wanted to interact with their customers. Remember the first time you checked your bank balance online? Or went to the web for driving directions? This was an example of the acceleration phase. The next natural step was to use the web to transform their relationship with their customers. Now a store could provide an interactive store locator, put their catalogs online, let customers buy their products over the web, and offer chat and customer service. This was the transformation phase. WEB MATURITY MODEL Customer Experience Inform (brochureware) Engage (interactive) Transform (new services) How does an enterprise create a mobile strategy that will get them the results they require quickly, and provide a scalable plan for the future? 2012 APPCELERATOR, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 4

1 Decide how you want to interact with your mobile user Mobile apps are following the same maturity path as the web. Simple brochureware, apps that inform or entertain, soon became engaging apps that make use of location, social, and cloud services. Finally, enterprises are transforming their relationships with customers and employees via these mobile apps. As the user experience evolves, so does application sophistication, user expectations, business transformation opportunities, and the underlying business models. Applications can now make use of cloud services like checkins, photo storage, and chat and in turn create amazing application experiences. At this stage, apps are combining mobile features with cloud services to transform their relationship with their mobile users. Choose the right type of app to achieve your goals Mobile Strategy Assessment How does mobile enhance your customer relationship? How can your internal processes be made more efficient with mobile apps? What use cases make the most sense for your customer? (mobile apps have been said to either save time or waste time) 2012 APPCELERATOR, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 5

Case Study: NBC ipad App reaches 2 million users within 9 months The Challenge: Scaling NBC's Approach to Mobile NBC now runs its mobile strategy similiarly to their successful web strategy. A single team is responsible for delivery across all mobile and web platforms; the team rapidly tests new ideas with its viewers and innovates quickly based on feedback; delivery is now timed to coincide with NBC's larger annual planning cycle for new show lineups and integrated offerings for advertisers. #1 in the App Store within 1st week of release Choosing Appcelerator is as much about planning for the future as it is innovating in the present. As we scale to include more programs across more devices, we need a platform that enables us to have organizational agility and efficiency. Appcelerator Titanium is that platform. Vivi Zigler, President, NBCUniversal, Digitial Entertainment Case Study: PwC's TravelWatch Global Workforce Product The Challenge: Provide a Secure Mobile Travel App for PwC's Global 1000 Customers PwC s Global 1000 clients are experiencing an increasingly common phenomenon their employees are becoming global mobile workforces. PwC s TravelWatch product is used by PwC clients worldwide to minimize the hassle of travel tracking. With Titanium, we were able to reduce our time-to-market by 60% over conventional native development." Ben Bahrenburg, Technology Director, PwC 2012 APPCELERATOR, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 6

2 Prioritize your audience Mobile brings with it additional complexities that the web did not have most notable, developing for multiple platforms. There was one major OS vendor in the wired world, Microsoft. Today, there are multiple OSes and multiple device types, each with their own native capabilities, both physical and software based. Many enterprises start with an ios app, but then where? It depends on how you want to engage your user. For example, entertainment companies and publishers may opt for an ipad or Android tablet implementation because the larger screen lends itself a better user experience. On the other hand, retailers may decide to expand to Android phones in order to engage the largest number of customers before, during, and after they transact. Enterprise apps may want to tap into business users and expand to BlackBerry and eventually Windows. As an enterprise matures its strategy, it's thinking about possibilities across all device classes, including telematics, smart TVs, and other emerging devices. Reach your customers wherever they are with native apps and on the mobile web Mobile Strategy Assessment Which form factors work best for your user and application interactions (phone vs. tablet)? What platforms are best suited for your customers (iphone for the best user experience, BlackBerry for business users, Android for most open ecosystem)? What is your device roll-out plan (iphone first, then Android for expanded phone-to-phone reach, or tablet for a better user experience)? 2012 APPCELERATOR, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 7

3 Choose a scalable development technology In the exploration phase, technology in the web world started out with HTML web servers. As companies moved to more engaging web apps, JavaScript and application servers emerged to support more complex and fullfeatured server runtime environments to meet scaling requirements. In the innovation phase, companies started to see that they could use the web to fundamentally transform their relationships with their customers. The web offerings in this phase were now full-blown applications. Web development was seen as strategic, and so it was funded and planned for with IT budgets. Ajax became a very popular technology as web clients started to look and behave more like desktop clients. On the server-side, companies were using enterprise application integration (EAI) products to integrate all of their various internal systems with the web. Integration was key to both timeto-market and a company s ability to innovate. Mobile is clearly taking the same path. Companies are typically building their first mobile app using the native development SDK. However, developers quickly find that using native SDKs can be highly restrictive, as apps must be re-written for each individual device (iphone and ipad), for each OS (ios and Android). And if you add to the mix the fact that there are more than 60 Android tablets, multiple BlackBerry OSes, and an increasing number of ios devices on the market today, scaling to all those devices is simply impossible. Just as web developers used Ajax and EAI products to scale websites, innovative companies are using scable mobile frameworks to optimize code reuse, easily integrate cloudbased features, and manage both native, hybrid, and HTML5 native apps from a single code base. Match your technology to your development needs 2012 APPCELERATOR, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 8

What does scalable mobile technology look like? The best way to answer this question is to look at the problems that are unique to mobile. The most obvious problem is scaling across devices with increasingly complex features. A scalable mobile strategy must do three things to solve this problem: Deliver the best device-optimized user experience possible across all operating systems. Enable companies to build and deploy mobile applications across multiple operating systems and devices, including native, hybrid, and mobile web, while enabling them to reuse as much code as possible, across OSes and app architectures. Scale quickly and easily to deliver more apps with better features across multiple device types. Mobile development platforms like Titanium allow developers to create native mobile apps for multiple devices using a single platform. By utilizing JavaScript for mobile app development, developers can build apps faster with a single development platform, and companies can move from siloed app development to leveraging reusable modular components. This can result in reuse of 65% or more of their code as they port apps from one OS to the next. Reuse of code within the same OS (e.g. iphone to ipad) is closer to 80%. Now you can scale to tens or hundreds of apps over multiple platforms all from a single development environment. Mobile Strategy Assessment What is your development and launch schedule, how often will you update your apps? How quickly can you get to market with new apps? Can you reuse code from one OS to the next, across app architectures? 2012 APPCELERATOR, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 9

4 Manage your app lifecycle Just as early web pioneers leap-frogged each other with better, more engaging websites, savvy companies are utilizing mobile analytics to quickly improve their mobile apps, and build more compelling experiences. Mobile device analytics give you deep insight into how your apps are performing, what features are being used the most, and where there are opportunities for improvement. There are two types of analytics. User analytics enables measurement of top-line adoption metrics, such as number of new users, active users, and total users over time, by geography, or by platform. Session analytics measures engagement with your application, through tracking number of sessions or session length over time, by geography or by platform. Best practices are to enable the end user to opt-out of any analytics within an application. By understanding what your users are doing with your application and how your app is performing, you can improve your app with better features and more compelling content. Mobile Strategy Assessment Who s using my app (age, demo, geo) and on what devices? What features are they using most? How are they navigating my app? How does usage evolve over time? How is my user base growing over time? What are my retention rates? Appcelerator is the #1 Mobile Cloud Platform Appcelerator is the leading enterprise-grade, cross-device mobile development solution on the market today. With over 300,000 mobile developers worldwide and 40,000+ cloud-connected applications used on 50 million devices every day. The company s flagship offering, Appcelerator Titanium, is the only platform to enable fully native, cross-device development from a single codebase for ios, Android, Blackberry, and HTML5 mobile web apps. Appcelerator s Cloud Services enable easy integration of compelling features like such as push notifications, user logins, and photo uploads. Appcelerator s customers include NBC, Zipcar, ebay, PayPal, and LEGOLAND. These companies develop their mobile applications on Appcelerator products so they can decrease time-to-market and development costs, increase customer adoption and revenues, and enjoy greater flexibility and control. Download Titanium for free at www.appcelerator.com. 2012 APPCELERATOR, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 10