Market Trends Shape Cantina’s Mobile Service Offerings

Several market trends have been shaping the mobile services we offer at Cantina.

The use of consumer technologies in the enterprise is increasing, including everything from Dropbox, social networks, Google apps, and mobile devices. Companies considering the deployment of business applications to the mobile context need to consider bring your own device (BYOD) strategies to support the devices that their employees are already familiar with and use every day. This has created significant IT governance issues which need to be resolved.

Enterprises are struggling with the cost to support their web presence on the plethora of devices that customers are using, including browsers, tablets and mobile phones. Smart companies are investing in responsive design and open standards to create a singular web implementation that morphs to work across multiple devices, reducing the total cost of ownership of several device-specific applications. The responsive design approach provides a cost-effective way for consumers to access the data and transactions they want on the devices of their choice

As enterprises need to create multi-device applications they are beginning to expose their transactions and data via web services. This approach enables companies to leverage the strengths of the presentation layer on each device while reusing their existing business logic.

The best practices for application use-cases and interaction design for mobile and tablet development are solidifying. Companies are adopting agile development processes with product roadmaps and prototypes driven on empirical data and research, allowing them to have the team productivity and insight required to keep up with trends, and the competition.

Cantina has several mobile service offerings that provide a structured approach to target these concerns. Our consultants help business departments such as marketing, sales and information technology close the gap on what is possible, create an approach on how to do it and provide applications customers will love to use.

Cantina’s Mobile Service Offerings Descriptions

Strategy Development

Perform audience assessment, competitive analysis, business objectives alignment, ROI model creation, success metric and roadmap development

Interaction Design

• Prototype and Concepting:
Create quick prototype and/or concept of mobile ideas for usability testing, budgeting and planning purposes
• Responsive Design:
Apply responsive design and progressive enhancement best practices to application redesign
• Heuristic Evaluation:
Optimize UI through in-depth user experience review, usability testing and best practice grading

Architecture and Development

• Mobile Development:
Implement native apps, HTML5 apps, and commercial products
• RIA Conversion:
Support interactive tool and application migration from Flash to HTML5 and/or other supported technologies
• Web Services Enablement:
Build web services to share data and transactions across multi-device use cases

Governance and Infrastructure

• Device/Platform Selection: Lead selection process for target devices, application platforms, and native vs web apps
• Product/Platform Migration:
Define the technology infrastructure, workflow and resources to support the mobile vision (conversion to a service oriented architecture (SOA))
• Device Management Strategy
: Develop plan to manage app deployment, security and updates/management of devices