the business of technology blog
Enterprise Application Store & The Purposed Application
February 1st, 2011 @ 07:18pm
The iPhone App Store and similar mobile store models from Android and Blackberry have experienced tremendous consumer acceptance. Total downloads from the iPhone App Store alone recently crossed the ten billion mark. Applications come in all varieties and mash up a set of capabilities that deliver rich user experiences. The category of applications that has seen the highest adoption is social platform tools like FaceBook, Twitter and FourSquare. This rapid consumer adoption is now crossing over into the enterprise as business and IT organizations are being faced with the challenges of supporting this new class of mobile worker.
The one common element of App Store applications is that they are purposed for a specific target solution. Enterprise applications, on the other hand, tend to incorporate the full functionality of a business process within their design. Organizations that have taken the first step to extract important business functionality from existing applications have turned to Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). The SOA model enables the decomposition and access to business logic and data layers – enabling externalization of the most critical functions. This results in the ability to share services across the enterprise as well as externally to partners and others within the organization’s business ecosystem.
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