Mobile revolution has opened up immense possibilities for humanity. Our general necessities like searching, browsing, online banking, online purchase, ticket booking, and social media networking have all become a touch away. Mobile technology is unleashing a great potential, making world more and more connected and converged. Organisations are enabling connectivity to their business through Smartphone. Business segments like large enterprises, small/medium business, small office/home office and mobile workers are now engaging actively through Smart phone. At a time when hundreds and thousands of mobile applications are being developed, enterprise segments are actively working in bringing business applications on mobile platform. In the next 2 years, more than a billion users are going to have access to internet through their mobile phones. Have you thought about what is happening in Mainframe space on this development?
Smartphone devices entered in to market in 1990’s. In the initial years, business leaders and enterprise executives increasingly used Blackberry mobile phones and other smart phone devices for email access. Later after year 2000, the mobile revolution has got accelerated with more models entering into the market. Apple’s i phone grabbed wide market acceptance. Apart from a device for calling and text messaging facilities, mobile phones have evolved into mini computing devices thereby increasing its market relevance. Constant connectivity options with wifi internet, handy nature advanced computing capabilities etc make mobile devices apt for office and business purposes greatly. Mobile device platforms and operating systems currently available in market include Apple i Phone, RIM Blackberry, Symbian OS, Windows Mobile and Google Android.
Now, Mainframes are also joining the bandwagon. The technology is adapting to mobile revolution. Mainframes of 21st century are no longer monolithic or closed architecture legacy systems. Mainframe application development service is now actively focussing on building mobile applications that can directly interface with Mainframes. Modern Mainframes can run traditional batch jobs, transactional jobs and modern J2EE workloads. By integrating SOA into a Mainframe environment, modern Mainframe workloads can now be accessed as service components. There are also great developments happening in Mainframe arena with the SaaS model of cloud computing. Business world is expecting unprecedented opportunities, with this convergence. SOA and Web 2.0 solutions can play a key role for enabling on demand access to Mainframe data with mobile computing devices. Users can also be notified when events occur in Mainframe systems.
Along with the enormous opportunities comes a great challenge too. Connecting a high power beast like Mainframe to a mobile Smartphone, brings in great challenge by itself for the developers. Having a secure connectivity to Mainframe system, developing a platform independent mobile application, making the application less resource hungry etc are the great challenges in front of enterprise Mainframe mobile application developers. Sensing the huge market potential with mobile computing, enterprises are willing to take this challenge.
The Mainframe-mobile revolution has only just started. At a time when Mainframe applications are becoming more customer oriented, this revolution is going to shape more in the future. In the near future, we would see bundles of mobile apps available from the Mainframe Vendors.
Watch this space!!
