All About MEAP

Increase productivity while reducing cost and streamlining through the Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP), an application platform middleware that enables and supports the development of mobile enterprise applications. By deploying MEAP, you can help reduce effort, time and money required to develop mobile applications. Other benefits of MEAP include:

• Faster development and deployment across multiple mobile devices and operating systems
• Multiple feature integration
• Robust security
• Strong back-end connectivity
• Easy application and user management

To determine if MEAP is suitable for your organization, you should assess your organization’s strategy, current technology infrastructure, customer needs and business model against some key parameters, such as mobility roadmap, multiple devices, OS and back-end systems, and application types and target users. The following can help you understand the aspects of MEAP:

• Roadmap — There are two fundamental parameters that you should consider at the onset: strategy and cost. Opt for MEAP if your mobility strategy includes multiple enterprise applications that have to be deployed across the enterprise
• Applications — MEAP supports both business-to-employee (B2E) and business-to-consumer (B2C) applications and is always a candidate for consideration if data security and support for multiple mobile OSs is a critical application requirement
• Security — In the mobility space, data security takes on a larger dimension because of multiple systems, networks and devices. Such a combination makes the entire system extremely vulnerable
• Deployment — The beauty of deploying MEAP is that it is similar to any enterprise software deployment, on premise behind your firewall or on-demand using as a service model. MEAP provides enterprises the flexibility to deploy applications depending on needs, strategies or resources
• Robustness — The core of any successful mobile deployment is the server — the nerve center that handles millions of real-time transactions over hundreds of networks worldwide. It bridges the back-end systems and front-end mobile applications, which involves high security, flexibility, scalability and configurability
• Integration — The biggest challenge for mobile applications is the data and the integration from a variety of sources both within and without the organization. A sound MEAP should have the wherewithal to interface with any and all back-end systems: custom legacy applications, packaged applications or third-party Web services
• Connectivity — Mobile applications should be above all, smart. The development platform that you adopt should enable that intelligence by ensuring sound logic across applications, devices and users
• Flexibility — MEAP enables development capabilities across devices, including Android™, Symbian, iPhone®, Blackberry®, Windows® Mobile as well as other new entrants in the market. It also supports a combination of technologies
• Management rights — Often the ongoing management of deployed applications is overlooked. Many times after the device is on air, monitoring how the application is being used or whether it needs improvements is remiss