ROAM profiled in Xchange Magazine on Mobile SaaS

Mobile SaaS: A Way to Jumpstart Mobile Enterprise App Deployment?

A Hybrid Approach to Extending Enterprise Applications to the Handset Might Be the Ticket

Mobile applications might be in the headlines thanks to ever-faster networks and high-profile, capable endpoints like the ubiquitous iPhone, but the reality is that more than 95 percent of enterprises have yet to extend their in-house applications/data/transactions to the mobile environment. The reason is a bit pedestrian: the enterprise market might be a huge untapped market crying out to be untethered, but it’s also one that faces a whole raft of back-office challenges. Reality trumps coolness: that’s lately been the sad reality of the mobile app world.

The issue at hand is not just in developing the applications themselves — the industry seems to be working hard on that side of the equation, with open development ecosystems for BlackBerry, iPhone, Symbian, and Android and other Linux variations springing up like mushrooms after a rain. Rather, the issue is how to provision, service and maintain those applications across a variety of form factors, networks and operating systems.

“Essentially, the question to ask is how can we address the fundamental problem that we have a large number of fragmented device ecosystems?” explained Will Wang Graylin, CEO at ROAM Data Inc., which has created a mobile computing architecture for extending enterprise apps to the handset. The first fruit is an m-commerce application for direct sales and multilevel marketing companies. “Right now you have two mainstream options: the client-server approach, or delivering applications through a mobile browser.”

Read the rest of the story in Xchange Magazine, "Mobile SaaS: A Way to Jumpstart Mobile Enterprise App Deployment?"