The month of March and April means spring, renewal, and the moving of clocks forward to accommodate Daylight Savings Time. For many, it is also the season of growth as snow and ice finally begins to melt, allowing for the growth of crops and vegetables.
In the past, gardening experiences involved sharing information between friends or the reading of the yearly almanac. While those are still reliable methods, the addition of cloud has added a new wrinkle to the process in the form of a mobile application. Similarly, the development of innovative applications has evolved as well. While past technologies existed in a silo, the development of new ones require a completely new approach.
It is time to spring into action.
Creating Apps for Growth
The application ecosystem has expanded mightily over the past few years, with several million available on both Apple and Android’s platform. Even with the dearth of applications, few rise to the top and stay, attributed to long including update cycles and device compatibility. With that said, there are some common characteristics of enduring applications:
- A Platform to Work On: Coding from scratch may leave your competition impressed, but it certainly is not the way to succeed. Many developers today use a platform like IBM Bluemix to do their work and accelerate their time to market. PaaS systems are efficient, integrate numerous modern features, and are low-cost.
- Security: Breaches have become commonplace, especially as viruses become stronger. One of the best ways to avoid a breach is to leverage a strong public cloud provider. It is one thing for your provider to be a hit, but another if your application is not protected. You will risk the loss of customers and future business.
- DevOps Mindset: Applications are not just one-time release anymore. To retain customers, developers must also become marketers and release new features regularly in addition to leveraging automation for quality assurance. The best developers have moved from waterfall to Agile and DevOps methodologies.
- Data and Integration: The new world of application development and innovation lends more credibility to data and integration. Enabling a connection between your application and social networking sites, email, and other platforms extends your engagement capabilities. After all, not using data for business gain is just as bad as not having any at all.
How does your organization develop applications? Is there a particular mindset that your teams deploy? Let us know in the comments section below.
Spring Forward with Perficient
Are you looking at Bluemix for your development needs or looking to develop with IBM Mobile Foundation? Visit us at booth #677 at IBM’s Interconnect conference March 19-23 and join our own Jay Ordway for a session on developing hybrid mobile applications in the cloud (Tuesday March 21, 4:45 – 5:30 p.m.).
You can also reach out to us at sales@perficient.com for a conversation and download our hybrid cloud guide for more information.
Learn more about our IBM practice here.
