SmartPhone & Tablet Approach

It should come as no surprise that these are exciting times in the mobile enterprise marketplace!  New mobile platforms, a multitude of new devices, and even new buzz words (e.g. ‘cloud computing’, ‘consumerization of IT’) have arrived to disrupt the status quo.  To stay ahead of the curve, Blue Dot has been making steep investments in all of these matters and we remain committed to our primary objective of transforming recent mobile technology evolution and innovation into real business benefits for our business partners and customers. 

Our take on the Industrial Grade versus Consumer Grade device debate
Traditional devices for our Advanced Mobile Line of Business (LOB) applications have been industrial grade barcode scanner-enabled PDAs and rugged laptops / Tablet PCs. Though less expensive consumer grade alternatives have long been available, they were often comparable in performance, battery life, and data storage. The general consensus in the industry was that the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) was better over the long term with industrial grade devices than the more fragile consumer grade devices. 

With the advent of the latest SmartPhones and Tablets, this rationale is being seriously challenged, even within industries and markets where enterprise mobility solutions have long been deployed. We are now seeing that organizations want and expect to run many of their mobile solutions on inexpensive consumer grade SmartPhones or Tablets. These devices are often more user friendly and have better performance characteristics than their industrial grade counterparts.  Even the TCO assumptions are proving difficult to prove as their vastly lower price point may offset the inconvenience of periodically replacing a broken device.  Industrial grade devices still have their place however, and many workplace environments and mobile applications require highly specialized features and capabilities that cannot be supported by current consumer-grade alternatives (e.g. cold, wet, and/or explosive environments, highly accurate GPS receivers, etc.).

Our approach to delivering the very best SmartPhone and Tablet solutions
While some mobile LOB application providers use tools and frameworks promising “write once, run everywhere” capabilities, Blue Dot believes that rich, embedded mobile LOB applications written in the appropriate native tools for each target platform remain the best approach for  delivering the most intuitive, functional and high performing mobile solutions that our business partners and customers want. In accordance with this approach, Blue Dot has successfully designed and developed mobile LOB solutions for devices running Apple’s iOS (iPhone and iPad), Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7. Every mobile application developed for each of these mobile platforms utilizes the platform’s native look & feel and behaviors, resulting in vastly superior applications than the generic applications developed using cross platform technologies. You can find our current SmartPhones and Tablet applications available for download from Apple’s App Store, Android’s Market, and Window Phone’s Marketplace and evaluate our approach for yourself.

Our approach to utilizing the Advanced Mobile Platform for SmartPhones and Tablet solutions
A core component of all of our mobile LOB solutions has long been the Advanced Mobile Platform’s specially optimized communications and integration infrastructure, SnapSync. Blue Dot has made significant investments in SnapSync and Microsoft’s cloud computing platform to create Advanced Mobile Cyan, our new Windows Azure powered version of SnapSync that provides optimized communications services that are accessible and compatible with all major SmartPhones and Tablet platforms and that includes new multi-tenant administration and integration services that allow cloud resources to be efficiently and securely shared across multiple customers and enterprise systems.

Blue Dot Solutions and Advanced Mobile: Fusing Art & Science
The devices, the tools, the technology and the demand for enterprise mobile LOB solutions all exist here and now.  Any independent developer or IT department can readily acquire the objects necessary to develop mobile applications. Many companies, including some very large independent software vendors, have produced highly unusable, unsuccessful mobile LOB solutions for many years. The advent of new mobile platforms and technologies has given rise to independent developers and a plethora of iFart and iPortal apps.  However, Blue Dot believes that truly useful and successful mobile applications require a combination of art (e.g. skill, subject matter expertise, and best practices / lessons learned) and science (e.g. tools & technology) versus science alone. Blue Dot has been dedicated to mobile enterprise solutions for over 20 years and has over 900 customers in more than 10 countries worldwide as a result.