Developers face increased challenges today to meet aggressive DevOps cycles while needing to keep up with constantly changing technologies at the same time. In a recent webcast, Leslie Chau, Offering Manager, IBM MobileFirst Platform, discussed how using a Mobile Back End as a Service (MBaaS) can help deliver better apps with better business results.
So, what is MBaaS?
Developers today, according to Chau, have to deal with both frontend development and backend services. Given the array of current technology offerings, frontend development has so many components that developers have to worry about. They’re developing not only for mobile channels, but also digital touchpoints like the web, and different versions of IoS and Android. Oh wait, and here comes Apple CarPlay, another new technology. So, if your competitor is looking to integrate this new technology, you know you will be adding that technology to your mobile app pile. Don’t forget that all these different frontend touchpoints have different nuances and different SDKs to go along with them too.
At the same time, the backend developers have to think about how to accelerate the development cycle to meet business demand. From a developer’s point-of-view, they can tap into things like communities, open-source frameworks, and community tools that “step into the backdrop of developing native apps and use things like Xcode.” With all this intricacy, it can really get complicated to figure out how to connect robust frontend activity to an equally complex backend.
In the backend, everything happens from a development perspective and an operational perspective. Developers want to concentrate on features and functions that will bring value to the user or to their business. They don’t want to have to worry about the plumbing, or worry about developing integration. They just want to be able to access things like an SDK to authenticate against some goal, so they can do things like synchronize data across different touchpoints, different channels, or have offline access so they can optimize the experience for the user, and then see how that app is performing with data and analytics.
That is difficult in itself because you are talking about a lot of backend capabilities. All these backend capabilities have to work with some sort of systems record in the enterprise world where most of the business intelligence sits. The big challenge for that is, not only are these backend services tapping into the business records that feeds into the frontend, business is pushing developers to deliver at a two- to six-week cycle. What this looks like is a DevOps pipeline that keeps going and goes faster than you. On top of all that, developers have to worry about the development, the code check, the automatic building, testing, beta testers, and going into production. So that cycle makes it very challenging for developers to keep up with the business requirements and speed up the pace of this change.
IBM conducted a study of about 500 to 600 of their customers to see how many enterprises are successfully delivering mobile apps. The measures of success used in this study were developed on time, on budget, on scope and being adopted by their customers. The result? Only one third of these mobile apps projects were successful. The study concluded that this mobile economy is inundated with lots of user choice. The proliferation of low cost (and even free) apps and zero switching costs allows users to find an app with the same or similar functionality. What is needed to address this problem is a hybrid cloud approach, natively anchored in DevOps, to help you continually deliver engaging app experiences and which ultimately increases your success rate.
The MBaaS platform provides the right approach to address the new challenges the growing development cycle contains because its flexibility allows you to use cloud APIs to assemble the app. Its collaboration features keeps the production cycle progressing on schedule with the key stakeholders (developers, designers, testers, business, IT Ops, and end users) in your project able to have a hand in its app’s development. Built-in usage analytics are at your fingertips to immediately show the success of your app or help identify what needs improvement.