Retail Apps using MADP – (Mobile App Development Platform)

By Bhuvana Balaji

Retail mobility has seen a paradigm shift over a decade. From bulky electronic cash registers to mobile Point-of-Sales, consolidated delivery logs to instant proof of delivery, tedious stock audits to automated stock controls, generic offers to contextual services, and so on.

Though reachability to customers was the focus during the onset of retail mobility, its incessant evolution brought in unifying solutions that coherently addresses the needs of every stakeholder in the retail chain. With these solutions, aspects such as Human Resource Management, Finance Management, Supply Chain Management, Sourcing-Buying-Labelling, Marketing, Merchandising and Customer Experience have received radical optimization.

The traditional ERP systems, in addition to the expensive on-premise setup costs were complex and lacked agility and flexibility. The advent of Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP) brought in means to address current and future mobility needs across businesses and also ways to leverage the existing systems.

MEAP in the retail context, which originally meant to be an Omni-Channel access gateway, addresses the challenges across the mobile application lifecycle from design to deployment. It also amalgamates various components that resolve security breaches, integration barriers, multi-platform support, management of adverse networks, scalability issues and user roles provisioning. MEAP remains predominant in the B2E and B2B spaces.

MEAP offers:

• Integrated Development Environment
• Mobile Application Management
• Mobile Content Management
• Mobile Device Management
• Mobile Service Management

The industry saw consumerization of User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) crop up during the end of the last decade and a platform branch out as Mobile Consumer Application Platform (MCAP). MCAP lays emphasis on B2C applications.

Eventually, MCAP and MEAP merged into what is prevalent as Mobile Application Development Platform (MADP). MADP offers a gamut of UI and configuration templates to quickly design, develop and deploy apps. It also provides a wide range of integration methods. Few of the key players in this arena are IBM, Kony, SAP, Adobe and Antenna.

With a demanding need to have an elastic middleware server, mobile Backend-as-a-Service (mBaaS) arose. mBaaS provides huge integration capabilities by enabling APIs ranging from mobile, business components, database connectivity and access, infrastructure, external systems like ERPs or CRMs. The integration strategy of the mobile application to mBaaS is left to the discretion of the developer. Appcelerator, Windows Azure Mobile Services, Kinvey are few of the many mBaaS offerings available.

mBaaS being independent of the mobile application exposes only the required services for the mobile applications’ consumption. This limitation of not being able to manage the application at runtime led to a flavor of PaaS, Mobile App Platform-as-a-Service (MAPaaS). MAPaaS, in addition to abstracting the mBaaS, also provides a design-to-deploy platform for mobile applications. MAPaaS manages scalability, dependencies, connectivity, and source code control in addition to providing highly available development-deployment-test environment. PaaS is polyglot and hence, facilitates managing standardized policies and procedures across frameworks.

In my upcoming series of articles, we will skim through the various flavors of platforms using retail case studies as contexts. The first case study presented would be about addressing an in-store challenge of on-shelf-availability (OSA) through a mobile application developed using IBM Worklight (now IBM MobileFirst).