Around the (Route 128) World in (About Two) Days
October 31, 2012 —
(Page 7 of 7)
Learning what makes applications tick
Finally, into Boston, where a converted Summer Street warehouse holds the offices of Apperian, a 4-year-old company that has built a Platform-as-a-Service for mobile application management.
Called EASE (Enterprise App Services Environment), the platform is built for enterprises, said Carlos Montero-Luque, the company’s CTO. “Companies didn’t have a good way to deploy private applications to their workforce,” he said. Issues with the application’s content, user access and back-end connectivity made these deployments challenging.
The concept of mobile application management involves acquiring the application, understanding its behavior, securing it, managing all of its aspects, and finally deploying it, Montero-Luque explained. EASE includes APIs for importing content, and once in the platform, administrators can inspect, secure, extend, personalize and analyze the applications, and then engage with the workforce. Organizations can do as much or as little of the above as desired, or as dictated by compliance needs.
“You find that organizations in industries with a lot of regulatory oversight will do more of this than companies not as heavily regulated,” said Alan Murray, senior vice president of products.
The platform enables users to run reports on application usage, and to learn details of the devices those applications will be running on (such as networks they run on, or connectivity). Further, users can rate the apps, or be selected for beta tests, or be asked to “crowdsource” work, Murray said.
An example he gave was Estée Lauder, which engaged with Apperian to help roll out 15,000 iPad kiosks in stores across the United States and abroad that would help women decide which cosmetics would be best for them. “They designed the app but wanted us to help them secure the devices and secure the apps. People tend to want to do more with the iPads than the company wanted them to,” Murray said. The result was that by enabling self-service (“Women won’t lie to a kiosk like they might to a store adviser,” he said), sales increased dramatically, and now Estée Lauder is looking to add a sales checkout feature to the kiosks as well, he added.
“Mobility,” Montero-Luque added, “lets you work with people on a different level than before.”
That is something the two-day tour of Boston’s high-tech corridor confirmed.
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