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Tag: mobile app

  • Sendbird Adds API to Invoke ChatGPT From Mobile Apps

    Sendbird Adds API to Invoke ChatGPT From Mobile Apps

    Sendbird today added an application programming interface (API) to its low-code platform for building mobile applications that enables developers to add bots that communicate with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

    Shailesh Nalawadi, head of product for Sendbird, said this API makes it possible to add the ability to communicate directly with the generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform from within both new and existing applications in just a few minutes.

    Most developers will add natural language processing (NLP) interfaces to complement the graphical user interfaces that most mobile applications today surface, added Nalawadi. It will be up to each development team to determine how best to employ that capability, but Sendbird envisions, for example, a health care application being able to invoke ChatGPT to answer queries, he noted.

    In the longer term, Sendbird will provide APIs to enable mobile app developers to invoke a wide range of large language models (LLMs). LLMs are increasingly being developed for generative AI platforms and are being optimized for a range of use cases.

    While OpenAI’s generative AI model is being widely used thanks mainly to Microsoft, there are already LLMs that are being created for a narrower range of use cases using much less data. DevOps teams should expect APIs invoking any number of generative AI platforms from within applications to become commonplace in the weeks and months ahead as more end user come to expect to be able to engage these platforms from within almost every application Sendbird’s chatbot API can now be invoked by more 1,300 existing mobile applications alone.

    In general, developers have tended to employ chatbots sparingly because they are often too scripted and inflexible. ChatGPT, conversely, provides a much more open-ended user experience. Organizations can also feed historical conversations or customer relationship management (CRM) data to ChatGPT to drive more personalized and accurate responses, given the veracity of some of the data used to train ChatGPT.

    A recent survey of digital quality testing professionals conducted by Applause, a provider of a platform for accessing a networking of independent testers, found nearly one-third (30%) of respondents are dissatisfied with their current chatbot, IVR and conversational assistant experiences, with wrong answers (29%) and a lack of understanding (24%) as the top two reasons cited. The results indicate there is plenty of opportunity for improvement.

    Nearly three-quarters (74%) said they had a positive experience with the ChatGPT generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform, with more than two-thirds (67%) reporting the platform provided helpful answers to questions. In terms of work-related tasks, most said ChatGPT would either be “very” (43%) or “somewhat” (37%) helpful.

    It’s apparent now that generative AI platforms are about to change the way humans engage with machines. Instead of always creating an abstraction to interface with a machine it’s now feasible for interactions to occur between them using language humans readily understand. As such, the way applications are built and employed is about to fundamentally change in ways that are difficult to predict.

  • Balance Software Quality, Dev Speed and Cost With CI/CD

    Balance Software Quality, Dev Speed and Cost With CI/CD

    In many cases, success in the business world relies on software, be it a compelling mobile app, desktop application suite, interactive website or even an embedded system for the IoT. Because of this need, companies with mature software development processes enjoy a significant competitive advantage over those without. Part of fostering this maturity involves crafting quality software with high velocity but low costs.

    Modern software development methodologies, like Agile and its variants, play a key role in crafting applications in an effective fashion. As more companies adopted an Agile approach, the movement also fostered DevOps, a management structure combining software engineering and network administration teams while leveraging automation to build apps more quickly. In many cases, the ultimate goal for these adopters involved achieving the programming Holy Grail of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).

    So, let’s take a closer look at continuous integration and delivery and how it helps companies successfully balance quality, speed, and cost in their software development projects. In a competitive global economy, adopting this approach remains a crucial differentiator, whether or not a business also fully adopts DevOps. In either case, understanding the benefits of CI/CD helps your software company achieve its business dreams.

    A Closer Look at DevOps

    As noted earlier, DevOps somewhat grew out of the Agile movement, but it isn’t a software development methodology in and of itself. Instead, it involves a company merging its software development team and its network administration staff largely responsible for helping the process of building applications. It increasingly leverages modern technologies like containers and virtualization for development, QA and production servers and automation for builds and testing processes.

    This organizational structure and mixture of tools combine to help companies build high-quality software with high velocity and at a lower cost. A mature community grew around DevOps, including tools, best practices, process experts and more. While DevOps originally served as the sole domain of large enterprises, now businesses of all sizes involved in software development benefit from adopting this approach.

    Defining Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

    Continuous integration effectively automates the critical software development processes of builds and testing. It especially makes sense for shops using multiple programmers, as it works with the team’s source code version control system to ensure all programming changes are merged and remain in sync whenever a developer checks in their code.

    Any check-in typically kicks off a process where unit tests and a build are automatically run to ensure those changes don’t “break the build.” In pre-DevOps days, this tended to be a highly manual effort, leading to inefficiencies in any software development project. In short, the team only discovered any integration issues after a manual test. Automation now plays a crucial role in making this aspect of application building significantly more efficient. CI remains a critical best practice in any DevOps shop.

    Continuous delivery shares many similarities with continuous integration, especially its use of automation and the latest software development tools. However, instead of performing builds for internal developers and the QA team, CD focuses more on delivering a software product for release to a user community, customer or the public at large. Again, this is another part of the software development process that led to inefficiencies in the days before DevOps and automation.

    In terms of software development for mobile apps, CD ends up being the last part of the development process before the app gets delivered to the App Store or Google Play. It also comes into play with any fixes or feature improvements after the app is on the market. A key aspect of engendering goodwill among your customers directly relates to the speed of app improvements. Adopting a CI/CD approach plays an important role in making app changes with high velocity.

    CI/CD is the Heart of Successful Modern Software Development

    Simply stated, if your company wants to be a successful software developer, adopting both continuous integration and continuous delivery remains crucial. Following an older, manual approach causes too many bottlenecks and inefficiencies to thrive in a highly competitive industry. No matter how great your startup’s idea or app design is, failure to deliver it with high velocity ultimately results in failure. Once again, this same concept applies to fixes and feature enhancements after the app’s launch.

    At the same time, you don’t need to fully embrace the DevOps organizational structure by creating a separate team made up of software engineers and network administrators. At many startups with a small headcount, your developers might handle many of those network tasks, including managing virtual servers and containers. Hiring a network admin or two might be an unneeded luxury.

    In the end, if you want to build your startup’s app in the most efficient manner, adopting the CI/CD approach makes perfect sense. It provides speed that allows your team to effectively balance quality, speed and cost, resulting in a great app without overspending. It’s the right approach for any successful software project.

  • Leveraging Automation for Secure, Cost-Effective Mobile App Delivery

    Leveraging Automation for Secure, Cost-Effective Mobile App Delivery

    As businesses mobilize their customers and employees, they need to develop innovative mobile applications that safeguard user trust. But secure mobile development and manual security testing can be expensive and time-consuming—a bigger challenge in slowing economies. However, the latest innovations in security automation for mobile teams can drive down security costs by half while speeding release time, getting quality mobile apps to market faster to grow revenue faster.

    With mobile dominating all digital time spent online versus the web, businesses cannot compromise the safety of their mobile users and mobile data. Security automation integrated throughout the development process empowers developer, QA and security teams’ efficiency, enabling faster release cycles with built-in security. This approach powers success for digitally enabled businesses that depend on mobile apps to generate revenue, engage customers and tap new markets.

    A single security vulnerability within a mobile app can instantly damage a business’s financial stability, brand reputation and customer trust. Even highly respected brands like UnderArmour and British Airways experienced serious issues after their mobile apps were breached. Business leaders should consider the benefits of adding security automation directly into the development pipeline to drive quality and protect users in a cost-effective manner.

    Faster, Lower Cost Developer Cycles

    Suppose a business creates a 12-week plan to develop, test and release a mobile app software update with a labor budget of $60,000 per week. The development team creates a schedule to write the code in 10 weeks and allocates a two-week period for a manual security pentest. After developers finish writing the code, they must wait for the pentest results to point out any security issues. When testing uncovers security issues, devs, security analysts and QAs must determine which issues need to be remediated. Then the devs can fix the issue, retest to ensure it is properly fixed, then release it. Most of the time, finding any issues delays the release by weeks or months, delaying the expected revenue generation and other business benefits by weeks or months, in turn.

    Instead, businesses can take a cost-effective approach by running security automation continuously through the development life cycle. Dev teams can write code, allow security automation to run during off hours, and have tickets with built-in remediation info sent back to devs the next day. This can remove weeks of testing and remediation delays to ensure teams release on time and on budget. Businesses can cut costs further by establishing common coding, testing and remediation policies in advance and then deploying an automated policy engine to focus on just those security requirements and issues relevant to the policy to operate at the fastest pace possible.

    Integrating automated security testing into development tools enables DevSecOps teams to build, test, fix and release faster with security built in. Not only does this strategy increase the security and quality of the mobile app, it drastically lowers development costs by improving team efficiency.

    Faster, Lower Cost Security Testing Cycles

    Every organization with a mobile app has different security requirements. Those with low-risk mobile apps may outsource their security testing once or twice a year. Those in highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services may have internal security analysts and test as often as every release and event outsource pen testing quarterly. Whether testing internally or externally, security testing costs can become a major pain point for companies looking to manage their finances efficiently.

    The average cost of a full-scope, two-week outsourced manual pentest costs around $15,000 to $20,000 per test. If an organization tests its mobile app on a quarterly basis, its pentesting costs jump to $60,000 to $80,000 per year. Internal pentesting teams can potentially be cheaper, but organizations still need to pay for analysts’ salaries and the tools and resources they need to conduct tests. Whether a business has an internal security team or relies on outsourced manual pentests, leveraging security automation can significantly reduce costs.

    Businesses with internal security teams can use automation to test builds immediately after devs release code. By continuously assessing code quality from start to finish, security teams can eliminate their testing time and speed up release cycles. Businesses that outsource security testing can use security automation to cut costs by reducing the frequency of full-scope manual pentests. Instead of testing on a biannual or quarterly basis, continuous automation can help reduce the testing frequency to once or twice a year with comparable coverage.

    The most efficient approach possible is the hybrid security automation approach of guided testing that combines daily automated security testing as mobile apps are built with periodic human security analysts for coverage of the parts of the mobile app that automation can’t cover. Guided testing starts below $20,000 per mobile app for unlimited automated security testing integrated into DevSecOps toolchain with four periodic guided tests per year, slashing outsourced quarterly pentesting costs by more than 75%.

    Mobile apps play an important role in helping businesses generate much-needed revenue, but running fast and cutting corners without security built in ultimately places the business and users at risk. So business leaders should take extra steps to keep them secure, and securing mobile apps can be achieved without breaking the bank. By incorporating security automation and innovations like guided testing into the mobile app development process, businesses can maximize the speed of delivery while simultaneously reducing costs and improving quality.

  • Bitrise Expedites Neo Financial’s Mobile App Build Time and Delivery

    Bitrise Automates Mobile App Deployment for The Fintech Unicorn, Allowing It to Release Features Weekly to Apple and Android Marketplaces

    San Francisco, CA, January 12, 2023 — Bitrise, the Mobile DevOps company whose platform maximizes the overall business impact of apps for the world’s most sophisticated mobile organizations, today announced the results of its work to automate mobile app development for Neo Financial, Canada’s next-generation financial technology company. Working with Bitrise, Neo has significantly cut its build time for mobile processes, allowing its team to release more frequent mobile features. Neo has over one million members, and is one of the fastest Canadian companies to reach ‘unicorn’ status following its $145M Series C funding round in May of 2022.

    For hundreds of years, Canada’s banking landscape has been dominated by five major incumbent financial institutions that hold over $4 trillion of the country’s assets. But, despite their long-standing history, these banks have been slow to digitize and introduce new capabilities. This ultimately formed a void between Canada’s financial offerings and the evolving demands of today’s mobile consumer.

    For a newcomer to bridge this gap, bringing banking outside the confines of brick-and-mortar buildings and onto consumer-friendly mobile platforms was only the first step. It also required addressing features like account security, easy-to-understand transaction details, and credit score monitoring that Canadians consider most valuable in a mobile banking experience, according to Insider Intelligence.

    Through its partnership with Bitrise and its second generation GEN2 machines, Neo saw further efficiencies throughout its mobile development and release processes and has increased the app’s frequency of feature releases and app updates to a weekly cadence.

    “Reimagining the way Canadians bank is no small undertaking, and our partnership with Bitrise has enabled our team to not only accelerate our mobile development and release time, but focus our resources on building innovative products and features for all Canadians,” said Kris Read, Co-founder and CTO, Neo Financial.

    Investors have recognized Neo’s release speed as its key differentiator in today’s crowded fintech market. According to Andrew McCormack of Valar Ventures, the pace Neo releases new products is among the fastest Valar Ventures has seen, and, “as a result, Neo can be the biggest disruption the Canadian banking industry has seen in decades, and their influence on financial services available to Canadians will impact the lives of millions.”

    With the support of Bitrise’s automation, Neo’s engineering team continues to expand their products and features. In addition to standard banking and savings offerings, Neo’s mobile app now includes everything from Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) options for consumers and businesses, to Canada’s first fully digital and actively managed investment experience, and an online mortgage product with renewal and refinancing options.

    “A mobile app is no longer just an accessory for banks. In order to succeed, mobile needs to become a prominent aspect of banks’ business models,” said Barnabás Birmacher, CEO of Bitrise. “Neo’s success shows that, when development is handled efficiently, mobile has the power to transform the banking industry.”

    Bitrise works with more than 6,000 companies worldwide to deliver on the growing demand for mobile products. For fintech companies, this means automating vital stages of the app development lifecycle including regular security checks and testing to prevent bugs and delayed delivery of new mobile features.

    About Bitrise

    Bitrise is a Mobile DevOps company, whose platform is used by more than 6,000 businesses to maximize the business impact of their mobile apps. Working with Bitrise, the world’s most sophisticated mobile organizations get their apps to market faster, improve security and keep up with constantly changing mobile requirements. Bitrise enables organizations to automate testing, accelerate build times, and quickly understand how new pieces of code will affect live apps. Customers such as Transferwise(now “WISE”), Virgin Mobile, Grindr, Tag Heuer, Compass, Mozilla, Philips Hue, Babbe, Neo Financial and others use Bitrise to rapidly respond to the changing mobile landscape. Bitrise is a Y Combinator company, headquartered in Budapest, with offices in London, San Francisco, Boston and Osaka.

  • Preparing Your Android App for an Independent Security Review

    Preparing Your Android App for an Independent Security Review

    As of July 20, 2022, Android developers publishing new or updated mobile apps in Google Play must declare how their apps collect, share and secure data. The new Google Play Data safety section provides greater transparency and enables users to examine an Android mobile app’s security and privacy practices to decide which ones to download. Developers can take an extra step to safeguard user trust and demonstrate a high standard of mobile security and privacy by undergoing an optional independent security review. Founded by Google and industry security partners, the App Defense Alliance (ADA) established the mobile application security assessment (MASA) program to validate mobile apps against a globally recognized industry standard.

    Mobile app developers can work with ADA-authorized labs to have their apps assessed against the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) mobile application security verification standard (MASVS) L1 requirements to gain the MASA validation. Developers whose mobile apps have passed an independent security review will be able to highlight that distinction in their Google Play Data safety section with the independent security review badge.

    Mobile security experts from an ADA-authorized lab use the MASA specification crafted from the OWASP mobile security testing guide (MSTG) through a mix of automated and manual application security testing to independently assess the Android apps against a set of checks in six key areas.

    To prepare for their independent security review, developers should follow these secure coding best practices when building their Android mobile apps.

    Android Data Storage: Security and Privacy

    ● Use the Android Keystore system to securely store credentials including passwords, private keys, cryptographic keys and other information.
    ● Do not store sensitive data in external storage.
    ● Do not write sensitive data to the system or in application logs.
    ● Do not cache sensitive inputs, such as password fields.
    ● Mask sensitive data during user input.
    ● Fill out the Google Play console data safety section accurately, including both app code and SDKs.

    Encryption

    ● Check first- and third-party code to confirm the use of industry-standard cryptographic libraries and algorithms (with recommended settings).
    ● Avoid outdated cryptography algorithms (such as MD5 or SHA-1) for sensitive data or authentication routines.
    ● Do not hardcode cryptographic keys or initialization vectors (IVs).
    ● For security, use pseudorandom number generators (PRNG) compliant with FIPS 140-2 security requirements for cryptographic modules.

    Authentication and Session Management

    ● Ensure API endpoints that provide access to sensitive data require authentication.
    ● Use randomly generated session identifiers.
    ● Ensure sessions terminate at a remote endpoint when users log out.
    ● Include password complexity requirements enforced on both the client and server sides.
    ● Enable brute force protection for authentication endpoints.
    ● Ensure tokens have a reasonable expiration/timeout.

    Android Network Communications

    ● Transmit all app data over TLS.
    ● Ensure the app verifies the validity of the certificate during the exchange.
    ● Declare all transmitted data.

    Platform

    ● Do not request unnecessary app permissions.
    ● Validate any input your app accepts from external sources and sanitize if necessary.
    ● Ensure sensitive functionality is protected against unintended access for security and privacy.

    Code Quality

    ● Remove all debugging symbols from the app and libraries.
    ● Remove debugging code (such as hidden settings).
    ● Disable verbose logging.
    ● Account for third-party SDKs in the data safety section.
    ● Update third-party SDKs and remove critical vulnerabilities.
    ● Enable PIC and stack smashing protection in apps and libraries.

    Obtaining a MASA validation from an ADA-authorized lab gives developers a competitive advantage to drive more downloads by showcasing their commitment to mobile app security and privacy. When given a choice, mobile app users are more likely to download and use Android apps with the independent security review badge in Google Play. And enterprises with higher risk control requirements like finance, health care, energy and government are more likely to purchase and use these verified apps.

  • Modern Workers Demand Modern Technology

    Modern Workers Demand Modern Technology

    Companies today must think of their employees as customers and employ technology, including mobile apps, that employees want to use.

    I have always been a bit of a technophile. Many years ago, in another life, when I worked in technology sales, I was one of the first sales engineers on my team to buy a personal laptop to use as a way to manage leads and accounts. The advantages of doing so over pen and paper became clear to me within weeks. I was able to track my activities more effectively and follow-up more precisely than my associates.

    For similar productivity reasons, I also equip my home office with the best tools that make the most sense from a productivity standpoint. This has been true for both the years I worked out of my home office self-employed and as an employee.

    I expected the tech I bought for my work to always be better than the tech that was provided to me by my employers. I grew to dislike the outdated computers, software and support services provided by employers. Why didn’t these employers invest in their employees to make them as productive as possible? There was never a good answer to that question.

    However, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was an outlier. Most workers didn’t have personal computers and most appreciated whatever outdated green screen hardware and software was planted in front of them. Today, it’s the other way around: Employees don’t just want state-of-the-art technology that matches their work—they demand it.

    Consider a recent note from research firm Gartner that found outdated technology pushes Australian workers away from their employers. In fact, Gartner’s “Q4 2018 Global Talent Monitor” found that technology now ranks ninth in the top 10 reasons Australian employees will leave their current role.

    “People have become so used to advanced technology in their day-to-day lives, that they expect the same thing from their workplace. However, businesses are having a hard time matching the speed at which technology is adopted at home,” noted Aaron McEwan, human resources advisory leader at Gartner. “It’s not surprising that employees are becoming frustrated when they find themselves wasting valuable time navigating complicated systems and processes that utilize slow and old technology. It’s unproductive and inefficient for everyone involved.”

    According to McEwan, businesses no longer can ignore the needs of their employees and must start thinking of them as they do their customers, making it a priority to offer a personalized, seamless and efficient experience.

    This recent Gartner Australian survey taps into trends that have been underway for some time. A few years ago, Microsoft partnered with SurveyMonkey to conducted a survey of about 1,000 millennials in the United States. That survey found 93 percent of respondents said modern technology was one of the top aspects of a good workplace.

    This isn’t just about new hardware or off-the-shelf software. It’s also about custom-built enterprise apps. For decades it has been accepted practice that enterprise software didn’t have to compete with consumer software, and poor-to-lackluster design was considered acceptable.

    This is no longer the case. Most employees today are technically savvy and their enterprise apps are on their tablets and phones, right next to the consumer apps that they love to use.

    Enterprise IT can try to force them to use leaden software, but this strategy increasingly is unlikely to prove productive. If they don’t like a collaboration platform, they’ll turn to one of the widely available cloud alternatives. If they don’t like the enterprise CRM, they’re likely to turn to Salesforce or a competitor.

    When consumer apps are designed—think Evernote, Uber, Instagram or another favorite consumer mobile app—a considerable amount of thought is invested into the user interface and making the app enticing to use, designing an intuitive workflow and hiding complexity from the user into the background of the app. The same should be true for the enterprise apps designed for the enterprise.

    A recent survey from Adobe found that 61 percent of 1,500 enterprise leaders believe organizations that don’t deploy mobile apps are at a competitive disadvantage. I’d take that a step further and conclude that deploying isn’t enough. But it’s more than simply deploying an app; organizations that don’t deploy effective and compelling apps will find they are at a competitive disadvantage.

    — George V. Hulme

  • Digital Transformation Strains Traditional IT

    Digital Transformation Strains Traditional IT

    It’s hard to believe, but it’s almost been 13 years since Nicholas G. Carr wrote his famous essay, “IT Doesn’t Matter.” In that column Carr argued that IT had become so pervasive in enterprises and so widely used that it had essentially become a commodity and was no longer useful as a tool for business differentiation.

    “Behind the change in thinking lies a simple assumption: that as IT’s potency and ubiquity have increased, so too has its strategic value. It’s a reasonable assumption, even an intuitive one. But it’s mistaken. What makes a resource truly strategic—what gives it the capacity to be the basis for a sustained competitive advantage—is not ubiquity but scarcity,” Carr wrote.

    If that sentiment was accurate then, and I wasn’t convinced it was at the time, it’s not accurate anymore. Today, how enterprises are building and implementing IT is a clear differentiator when it comes to delivering apps business users and customers need and want, built and designed in ways they want to interact, and delivered in a timely manner.

    According to a recent report published by Salesforce, “2016 State of IT,” IT leaders are focusing on mobile apps, migration to the cloud, as well as building adequate cybersecurity/incident response, customer-facing digital apps and productivity apps. The report found that 68  percent of respondents said that they are increasing their budgets on mobile apps, cloud and security. The lion’s share of respondents also plan to increase their budgets allocated to cybersecurity (63 percent) while 62 percent will spend more on employee productivity apps.

    The report survey, conducted at the end of 2015, is based on responses from 2,255 CIOs and IT leaders from within the United States, Canada, Brazil, Australia, Japan, France, the United Kingdom and Germany. One of the first things to leap out at me from the results is, based on my interviews with many enterprise users, this increased focus on mobile apps and employee productivity apps will certainly be welcome in most enterprises—mobile app backlogs are a problem in many organizations today, as we covered in “Make ‘Mobile First’ an Innovation Strategy,” “Mobile App Development Will Soon Grow More Enterprise-Focused,” and “For More Mobile Wins, Enterprises Must Find their MVPs.”

    As IT leadership had to do in every other transformative period (and cloud, mobile, data analytics are all transformative) such as the displacement of mainframes by PCs in the 1980s, the rise of the local area network and the arrival of the commercial web in the 1990s, IT is at the center of business strategy. CIOs and IT leadership need to make sure they get themselves out in front of these trends and align the services technologies they are delivering with what their users need. According to the report, this need for IT to drive innovation is forcing leadership to rethink their IT organizations. And, as a result, according to the “State of IT” report, to help address this, 60 percent of enterprises now have a relatively new position in the chief digital officer.

    Of course, as this push by enterprises continue, the competition for talent heats up. According to the “State of IT” report, the IT skills demand gap is widening: there just isn’t enough talent to go around. I expect this to grow worse as these enterprise budgets for mobile apps only continue to grow in the years ahead. And one-third of those surveyed in this report said that they are having a painful time keeping skills relevant with emerging trends in cloud, mobile and data analytics. Seventy­-two percent say talent/IT skills development and training will be absolutely critical or very important for their team in the next five to eight years.

    According to this eWeek story, “How the Skills Gap Is Threatening the Growth of App Economy,” while nearly 80 percent of respondents of a CA-sponsored study, “The Battle for Competitive Advantage in the App Economy,” said that becoming a “software-driven enterprise” is a top priority, the biggest challenge they have in realizing that goal is the skills shortage. The top four critical skills in that survey close resemble the findings in the “State of IT” survey: data science, collaboration, DevOps and APIs.

    The research firm Gartner predicts that by the end of 2017 demand for mobile app development services will grow no less than five times faster than the capacity of internal IT organizations’ deliver mobile apps. With steady mobile phone sales continuing to fuel demands for enterprise mobile apps, the result will be, according to Gartner analyst Adrian Leow, that enterprises will have a hard time rapidly developing, deploying and maintaining mobile apps to meet demand because of the scarcity of developers with good mobile coding and development skills.

    “Organizations increasingly find it difficult to be proactive against competitive pressures, which is resulting in their mobile apps becoming tactical, rather than strategic,” Leow said in this statement. “We’re seeing demand for mobile apps outstrip available development capacity, making quick creation of apps even more challenging.”

    IT leaders are also seeing demand outstrip supply of those with skills in IT security and data engineering and data science—and there’s no sign of a letup in any of these disciplines. Considering all of that, and what Carr write 13 years ago, parts of IT may very well have become commodities—especially at the infrastructure layer of the IT stack. Just don’t try and sell that view to anyone trying to clear their mobile app backlogs or get the most value out of their data today. They’re too busy trying to keep up and hopefully innovate a little to have time to listen.

  • Make ‘Mobile First’ an Innovation Strategy

    Make ‘Mobile First’ an Innovation Strategy

    The call for organizations to be “mobile first” in application development has been so heavily embraced by enterprises that today mobile first has become table stakes. Being mobile first is no longer cutting edge but merely keeping pace with the enterprise pack. And a big pack it has become: According to ABI Research, revenues generated by the enterprise mobile market are growing at twice the rate as consumer apps and will reach $340 billion by 2017.

    With that size of a market in place, and nearly every employee having as many as three mobile devices, and every enterprise cranking out mobile apps as quickly as they can, how are organizations supposed to leverage that mobile infrastructure?

    Here are a few ideas how:

    Capture the continuous, mobile data inputs that matter

    As readers of devopsy.kinsta.cloud are quite aware, the enterprise has evolved into a continuously integrated, continuous developed and continuously deployed software and data factory. If you’re reading this site, you are aware of the tremendous benefits of DevOps, as well as the the changes containerization and microservices are bringing to IT.

    But the continuous nature of the modern enterprise isn’t just about applications, especially in today’s mobile environment. It’s also about continuous data being captured by users and devices. To successfully innovate and compete today, IT leaders must take advantage of all of the real-time, continuous data inputs that are rolling in from their users’ mobile devices and, increasingly, IoT-connected enterprise devices. This data is critical when it comes to understanding customer trends, supply chain health, regional differences in demand, emergencies as they arise, and many other factors regarding business and IT health.

    This means IT leaders must look for ways to capture, store and analyze these continuous mobile data inputs—and they better start now while the task is still manageable. According to IDC, there are already 200 billion computerized things connected to the Internet, and in four years there will be more than 50 billion networked sensors. The amount of data—and the importance of this data—is astounding.

    Leverage citizen developers to meet mobile app demand

    Enterprise mobile app backlogs continue to be the bane of enterprise mobile efforts. As covered in Clearing through the app backlog clutter, 85 percent of enterprises have an app backlog, and about half of those that do lag behind 10 to 20 apps in their pipelines. These app backlogs are costing enterprises in lost productivity and revenue.

    Where should CIOs and IT leaders turn to clear these backlogs? To their citizen developers, of course. Citizen developers are not without their own risks, such as with cybersecurity and regulatory compliance. But through proper awareness training and monitoring, these risks can be mitigated.

    And the benefits of working with citizen developers are too great to ignore.

    For one, citizen developers can help free the mobile app backlog as well as free the core development team for more mission-critical apps. If the business needs apps that won’t be connected to sensitive systems, or managing sensitive or regulated data, let these business developers build apps on their own, if they are so inclined.

    And the data indicates that more and more are, in fact, so inclined: According to an Intuit QuickBase study, “State of Citizen Development Report,” of the 148 professionals surveyed who identified either as citizen developers or as IT pros who support a citizen developer, 62 percent reported being able to develop apps in less than two weeks.

    Citizen developers can also be encouraged through training to program with code-free development platforms or some of the high programming and scripting languages. This way, when business users find themselves not as effective as they want because of the lack of an app, they can build the app on their own and not have to worry about IT bottlenecks.

    Deep dive into mobile micromoments

    Another way to drive innovation through mobile is to ensure development teams are developing an optimized mobile experience. That means taking advantage of micromoments. Today, workers don’t sit and focus on work as much as they used to. Nope. These days, they are updating data on their phones while scurrying between meetings, standing in line or doing whatever it is that they happen to be doing in-between primary tasks.

    According to an article on The VAR Guy titled, “Survey: Poor User Experience Leading Cause of Enterprise App Failure,” a survey of more than 340 respondents reported that 50 percent said their projects didn’t move forward in the enterprise because of user interface problems. Such UI problems were also cited as one of the greatest reasons for app delays.

    Mobile applications have to be designed with this use in mind. Not only do apps have to be designed with the smaller form factor in mind, but they also must be designed with contexts of the moments in mind. That means taking into account features of the phone such as location, voice and ability to insert photos or video. Developers need to develop specifically for both the form factor and the context in which users engage these devices. Only then will more benefits of mobile be reaped.

    Embrace an IoT platform

    Most of the data generated by IoT will be managed by IoT platforms, or IoT brokers. In 2015, the industry witnessed a lot of action in both the independent IoT players as well as large cloud providers.

    According to ReportLinker, IoT platforms, hardware, services and software will become a multitrillion market. “Revenue generated in 2015 [by IoT] was approximately $330 billion and is projected to reach $453 billion by 2020 with a CAGR of 6.2%,” the firm stated in this release.

    The large enterprise software players didn’t stand still when it came to IoT, either. Amazon, IBM, Microsoft and Salesforce all jumped into the IoT fray with their platform offerings. And while 2015 was the year for technology platforms to come to market, 2016 will be the year IT leaders prepare their organizations to take advantage of the data, insights and control that IoT will provide their organizations in the years ahead.

    Provide continuous mobile insights to users wherever

    When it comes to mobile data and big data analytics, it’s easy to forget that mobile devices are more than mobile data inputs—workers need them to provide valuable, contextual insight as well. To make the most of all of the data being captured from mobile apps and IoT platforms, it’s crucial that data be accessible anywhere and be displayed in ways that make sense to your employees and users.

    To succeed here, it’s important that big data insights don’t languish in big, isolated databases. Enterprise data needs to be accessible on every type of device, including mobile.

  • SolarWinds Powers Instacart’s DevOps Efforts

    SolarWinds Powers Instacart’s DevOps Efforts

    Instacart is an Internet-based home delivery service for groceries. Its mobile app and website enables consumers to leverage its service, which operates in 17 cities across the country. Customers order through the app, and Instacart’s personal shoppers fulfill those orders at local stores. Forbes magazine named Instacart the Most Promising Company of 2015, citing its growth since the company’s 2012 inception, notes Nick Elser, director of Engineering at Instacart.

    DevOps touches critical business applications at Instacart, including the apps and APIs for both iOS and Android mobile operating systems. It also supports back-end systems such as processes rooted in machine learning that assign grocery lists to shoppers and a pipeline that retrieves retail partner product data about available grocery items nightly.

    Key Mobile Development Challenges & Goals

    The Instacart DevOps shop is tasked with maintaining infrastructure in software, expanding the current business apps through innovations, and scoping and building future software for the company and its services. “We needed better infrastructure-monitoring solutions in place to save time and help scale parts of the infrastructure as the company continued to grow,” says Elser.

    Elser and his team looked at SolarWinds‘ capabilities, and were enticed by the Librato cloud-based monitoring tool’s potential to safeguard the performance and uptime of the company’s mobile APIs. “Our customers demand a high level of reliability from their consumer services,” says Elser. “Librato ensures the reliability of our mobile APIs by keeping a close eye on the health of our internal/external services.”

    Instacart hoped to use SolarWinds to support its infrastructure-scaling efforts. By enabling Instacart to leverage aggregates of logging data and statistics reports, Elser and his team could focus on creating an increasingly innovative and fruitful grocery delivery service. “We wanted to concentrate on scaling our operations, fleet of shoppers and metropolitan presence, as well as identifying processes that would enable us to move faster as a team,” explains Elser.

    Applying SolarWinds Tools

    With the software libraries they needed already present in the programming languages and environments they had on hand, implementing the SolarWinds tools to serve Instacart’s intended goals was relatively pain-free. One tool, Papertrail, required only a minor adjustment to existing config files to forward log records.

    Papertrail log management tool eased logging duties for the entire Instacart infrastructure. “I could have Papertrail on all my boxes, give it an endpoint and it would be aggregated into different buckets based on host names,” says Elser.

    Instacart also added SolarWinds’ Pingdom solution to notify the team about website downtime issues. This enabled the team to gauge real-world user experiences with uptime and to assess synthetic transactions for issues that could concern customers. “Pingdom was the most flexible uptime monitoring tool my team could find,” says Elser.

    Librato also proved worth the effort, thanks to its many value-adds. “We received a lot of free advantages with Librato because it came with Amazon CloudWatch integration,” says Elser. This made it fairly trivial to add instrumentation to our apps.”

    Using Librato ultimately enabled Instacart to create graphs to identify correlations in event data—instances where some relationship exists but falls short of cause and effect. Instacart could then use that data to pinpoint and resolve security breaches. “We also use the Librato CloudWatch integration to monitor database loads, as these affect the infrastructure’s health,” says Elser.

    By integrating Librato with Heroku and AWS CloudWatch and applying other SolarWinds apps, Instacart gained visualizations of important infrastructure elements and transparency into its entire software stack for monitoring stack health.

    Other Tools

    Instacart also uses other tools to help its DevOps, including Crashlytics mobile crash and usage tracking application, Urban Airship mobile push notification tool, Branch.io deep-linking application and the Rollbar exception tracking tool.