It's one thing to want all your enterprise applications available on mobile devices, fully functional and completely integrated. But it's quite another to be able to afford the resources to create that -- particularly if you have a large existing base of customers using on-premise software. Those users and their various older versions must be maintained, which can make it difficult to free up enough talent to create the mobile tools required.
"Perhaps the most interesting trend and concern in the market is the volume of demand for mobile apps vs. the available resources to build and deploy them," said Price. "The reality is that the demand for mobile apps inside an enterprise cannot be met if the current ways of building, deploying and managing those apps continue to require the highest skill levels in application programming. The resources aren't there and where they are, they are often expensive."
General Electric, for example, outsourced a lot of its mobile application development to Webalo, which offers an app development platform that acts as the interface between backend systems and mobile functionality.