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Red Hat a leading provider of open source solutions, early this week announced an update to its newly acquiredFeedHenry 3 mobile application platform.

The update, featuring a new Teams and Collaboration enhancement, is an expansion to one of the industry’s leading mobile application platforms for enterprise development. The FeedHenry 3 mobile application platform brings something new to the market with its integrated collaboration and access control features that support distributed development teams working in unison across multiple application projects.

The FeedHenry 3 Teams and Collaboration enhancement includes:

• Global collaboration on mobile application projects: Multiple distributed development teams, both in-house and outsourced, can work simultaneously in FeedHenry 3 on mobile application projects, which consist of a variety of client applications, cloud applications, and services, each with their own individual Git repositories. Developers work individually but with access to relevant project-related components, increasing agility at individual stages in the application development lifecycle.
• Role-based collaboration across the application lifecycle: Multiple skills and teams, from application design, front-end coding, back-end services development, analytics, administration, and more, can work concurrently across multiple application projects bringing applications to market faster and more efficiently without impacting individual developer agility and productivity.
• Access controls for mobile projects: Configuration of fine-grained controls at individual levels of each mobile project enables ease and security of access to key project components. This helps lock functionality at different levels within the platform. For example, by setting authorised access controls, sensitive back-end systems credentials can be insulated from third-party or other developer roles, providing greater security and compliance. This fine-grained access control also encourages an API-driven and micro-services development and discovery approach, enabling ease of discovery and reuse of core components and services.
• Company-wide visibility across mobile projects: Centralizing collaboration and control across multiple skills in multiple mobile projects, across various stages of their lifecycle, enables visibility of all company-wide mobile projects. This promotes a mobile-first approach to enterprise mobility, supporting innovation and reuse.

Commenting on the release Cathal McGloin, vice president, Mobile Platforms, Red Hat stated “Enterprise mobility has matured beyond a single application, silo approach, toward a team-based, business-centric model, where multiple applications, at various stages of the application development lifecycle, are managed by different teams. Organisations are looking to improve their agility and responsiveness on mobility projects while at the same time having distributed teams and centralised policy management. Teams and Collaboration, as an integrated feature across the FeedHenry 3 platform, addresses this need, enabling a granularity of access control across different development resources, whether in-house or third-party, that promotes agility and reuse of core components.”

Chris Marsh, principal analyst, 451 Research added “With 40 percent of large enterprises planning to increase their application development outsourcing, collaboration across enterprise IT, lines of business and any external partners that may be involved is crucial. As the complexity of juggling multiple application projects and the pressure of faster development cycles increase, enterprises will look to platform vendors to offer more team-based collaboration features that provide centralised visibility and control of all application development projects across the organisation."

Cathal McGloin, CEO of mobile enterprise app developer FeedHenry takes on the role of myth buster as he debunks a few false beliefs regarding mobile development across the enterprise.

This is following the mobile app platform provider analysed customer data and industry RFPs from organisations with more than 1,000 employees.

Myth #1:  Enterprise apps take at least six months to develop and deploy

Industry received wisdom dictates that apps, especially those designed for enterprise, can take at least half a year to build and launch. With some organisations requiring anywhere from 10-100 apps to serve different business units, the time required to build apps can appear prohibitive. However, the right mobile platform can halve app development time to just 60-90 days. The key is to reuse code and backend services where possible in order to speed integration.

Myth #2:  Data is king, but it's too complicated for apps to access legacy systems

Enterprise organisations that have already made large investments in systems, such as ERP, are hesitant to develop mobile apps that cannot seamlessly plug into existing mission-critical technologies. On average, a suite of enterprise apps connects to between 2 and 6 backend systems and APIs, including Sharepoint, Oracle, MySQL and SAP. Because 2 in 3 of these backend systems do not have accessible APIs, this can slow down the development process or make mobile apps unusable. Using an enterprise-grade mobile backend as a service (MBaaS) with an API infrastructure solves this issue by enabling legacy systems to be easily accessed by mobile devices.

Myth #3: Mobile app developers must keep up with a myriad of coding languages and frameworks – it's impossible

Learning new development languages in order to build individual apps for each device platform can be tedious, and for some enterprises entails constantly hiring fresh developers with different skill sets. According to Forrester, when creating hybrid cross-platform apps, developers often employ as many as 10 different coding languages for enterprise app development projects. Common coding languages required include HTML5, JavaScript, Objective C, C#, Sencha Touch and Node.js. and these don't even include languages proprietary to traditional MEAP platforms. To simplify development, developers can use mobile app platforms using a "Bring Your Own Toolkit" approach that allows them to use the languages and toolkits they are most comfortable with.

Myth #4: Enterprise apps are always data-heavy, placing high loads on handsets and backend systems

The best mobile app platforms take large amounts of data from the backend and transmit a small filtered set of data to the handset: reducing overall demands. For each enterprise app session, the size of data transferred for each app should be less than 1MB.

Myth #5: Having a "Chief of Mobility" is the best way to handle company-wide app development

This myth assumes that one central figure will successfully oversee app development and deployment across the enterprise. In reality, the average enterprise mobile app development project requires at least 20 personnel, including business heads, developers, project managers, IT and employees. By collaborating and using the same technology standards and requirements, a Mobile Centre of Excellence or Mobile Steering Committee can guide mobile projects across multiple business units without creating new silos.

Today's technology allows for the swift creation of apps without vendor lock-in should take advantage of the new technologies at their disposal. Agile, open, collaborative and powerful cloud-based mobile application platforms now render obsolete long-held notions around lengthy and complex app development and deployment.

Check out FeedHenry's infographic that outlines these 5 myths here!

Cloud-based mobile application platform vendor, FeedHenry, has commented on BlackBerry’s decision to open up its BlackBerry 10 operating system to allow its smartphones to be directly managed by third party companies: AirWatch, Citrix, IBM and SAP.

FeedHenry, an AirWatch partner, believes that the announcement is a further signal that enterprises are looking for the flexibility to support employees using an array of mobile devices and operating systems. Consequently, enterprise providers need to deliver an end-to-end mobile experience that facilitates management of data and applications consumed on those devices.

Commenting on BlackBerry’s decision, Cathal McGloin CEO of FeedHenry, said,

“Rather than managing the device, enterprises are now focused on controlling access to sensitive data as it moves between the organisation and the device. MDM, app development and app distribution are linked by the common thread of data security. It makes sense to secure apps and multiple devices and manage user policies through the same platform. Releasing BlackBerry 10 APIs to the leading MDM providers helps enterprises in this task.”

At the start of 2014, former IDC analyst Stephen Drake, VP Business Development at FeedHenry, predicted that BlackBerry would become a cross-platform Enterprise Software Provider, “Where BlackBerry recognises its strength and value is in cross-platform mobile enterprise software solutions, starting with security, MDM and, in the future, mobile applications.

BlackBerry has approximately 100,000 BlackBerry Enterprise Servers across the globe in major organisations. The company is focused on retaining those customers with cross-platform offerings that have begun with an MDM solution and will include more completed mobile enterprise offerings for iOS and Android, such software offerings are core to its new direction.”

In February FeedHenry announced a partnership and platform integration with AirWatch, the world’s leading enterprise mobility management vendor, to enable enterprises to manage multiple apps and devices from a single platform. AirWatch was acquired by cloud pioneer, VMWare, in January 2014.