1. In-house Post-PC Apps
for the Enterprise
Matt Baxter-Reynolds
The Platform, May 2013

2. Agenda
• Post-PC in context
• Building solutions
• Delivering solutions
• Q&A
In-house post-PC apps for the enterprise 2

3. Platforms discussed today
• We’ll be looking at…
– iPad
– Android tablets
– Windows tablets
• Not BlackBerry…
– PlayBook is not current OS wave
• Most of what we discuss applies to both
smartphone and tablets
In-house post-PC apps for the enterprise 3

4. Post-PC in context
In-house post-PC apps for the enterprise 4

5. Post-PC devices
• “Post-PC” devices refers to current
generation tablet and smartphone
“compute devices”
• Apple’s last reported figures were 19.5
million iPads sold in the last quarter…
– That’s 2.5 iPads sold each second
– Up from 12 million like for like
• We know people are buying them!
– But what are they using them for?
In-house post-PC apps for the enterprise 5

6. Personal use of post-PC
devices
• Smartphones and tablets are
“relationship-centric”…
– Connects you to the people and things that
are important to you
– Based on “ubiquitous computing” (“ubicomp”)
concepts laid down in the 1980s
– Original concepts includes “tabs”, “pads”, and
“boards”
– Always around, but in the background
– Not about work
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7. Business use of post-PC
devices
• Computer systems are about commercial
efficiency…
– “We can manage our cash flow better if we have
computerised credit control”
• Therein lies the tension…
– Post-PC devices don’t really make much sense
against commercial operations
• Except for niche, traditional mobility requirements
– The trick is to apply relationship-centric thinking
to commercial operations
• B2B – spend profiling
• B2C - M&S shopfloor
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8. Typical use of post-PC
devices in business
• Classics…
– Email
– Managing a diary
– Web browsing
– Document browsing
– Navigation (finding meetings)
• Newer ideas…
– Skype
– Evernote/OneNote
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9. Replacing the PC?
• Depends on the audience…
– Common to find that C-level executives can do it
– Specialist jobs can…
• But typically only those in traditional mobility space
– There are likely others
• The intention is never to replace the PC
– This is a key part where people get confused
– Deliver one tool for commercial efficiency
– Deliver another tool for relationship efficiency
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10. What do people mean by
the “death of the PC”?
• They mean the PC stops being important
to the consumer space...
– The consumer “compute device” market gets
bigger compared to enterprise
– The enterprise market therefore becomes
niche
– …but not necessarily smaller in and of itself
• Thus the PC is not “dying”…
– It likely does not find a new life outside of
commercial efficiency
In-house post-PC apps for the enterprise 10

11. Building solutions
In-house post-PC apps for the enterprise 11

12. General shape of the problem
• Identify opportunities that are
relationship-centric…
– Don’t be lulled into thinking of the tablet as a
terminal
• Device types…
– Enterprise-supplied
– BYOD
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13. Available delivery technologies
• Native code
– Developers have to write apps in the toolset that the
vendor prefers they use
• HTML5/Hybrid apps
– Developers build a packaged website
– PhoneGap, Titanium are classic examples of this
approach
• Shimming
– Xamarin is a classic example of this approach
– Developers build apps using an abstraction layer above
native code
• Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) or Web apps
– Treating the tablet as a PC-like console
In-house post-PC apps for the enterprise 13

14. Native code defined
• iOS
– Xcode, Objective-C, Cocoa Touch
• Android
– Eclipse, Java, Android SDK
• Windows 8/Windows RT
– Windows Store apps
– Visual Studio
– WinRT and C# – this not .NET
– HTML5/JavaScript
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15. Shimming
• Xamarin is the classic example
• Principle here is to remove a chunk of the learning
curve...
– Still the vendor's API
– But a different language and related tooling
• The advantage...
– Less time to spin up
– More commonality across platform
– Close to the platform owner's vision
• The disadvantage
– Dependence on a third-party
In-house post-PC apps for the enterprise 15

16. The Native Windows Wrinkle
• Microsoft’s vision is…
– Metro-style (“Modern UI”) aesthetic
– Windows Runtime (WinRT) API
• However, if you avoid Windows RT (ARM)
devices…
– You just have a normal Windows client
– Run anything on it as you would normally do
In-house post-PC apps for the enterprise 16

17. The choice
• The basic decision is which of those four
paths you choose...
o Each path comes with different velocity on
initial development
o But, each path comes with development debt
o You can blend the approaches to suit your
needs
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18. The additional complexity
of cross-platform
• Enterprise hasn’t had to worry about this
much
• Cross-platform is about both what you need
today, and what you need tomorrow...
– So be careful if you only need iPad today
• Very difficult to achieve
– There is virtually no crossover between toolsets
– Code has to be re-crafted, re-tested multiple
times
• Be wary of "magic bullets"In-house post-PC apps for the enterprise 18

19. Native code – Pros/Cons
• Pros
o Closest to the vendor's vision
o Best performance, best experience
• Cons
o Difficult to get up to speed
o Creates complex skills requirements
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20. Hybrid apps – Pros/Cons
• Pros
o Can reuse existing skills
o Very fast to get something working
• Cons
o Almost impossible to build anything complex
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21. Shimming – Pros/Cons
• Specifically...
o Xamarin, as this has the only mature product in this
space
• Pros
o Can take a lot of enterprise skills over (C#)
o Very close to the vendor's original vision of how the
tooling should be
• Cons
o Could be introducing debt that you don't need
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22. VDI/Web – Pros/Cons
• Pros
– Cheap and easy
• Cons
– Very poor user experience
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23. The particular problem with
hybrid apps
• The perception is that this is a sensible idea...
– All of the pieces are in the right place
– The reality is that the tooling is horrible...
• Totally out of step with the vendor's vision
• Great feedback initially...
– Gives the impression of progress at first
– Like running into glue shortly after
– Very hard to get across the finish line
• The cross-platform argument is not good enough
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24. Examples of hybrid app
problems
• Functionality…
– Dependent on the functional set in the library
– Have to write plugins to fill gaps…
• Might as well just write native
• Performance…
– Dependent on JavaScript performance
– Might be OK on device A, awful on device B
– Very little you can do about this
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25. The problem with VDI
• VDI assumes the tablet is a PC…
– …which misses the point as the tablet is a post-PC
device
– VDI imposes commercial efficiency onto a device
that’s about relationship efficiency
– Also problems with the UI
• As a result, you get a tremendously bad user
experience
• Use sparingly
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26. Is learning the native toolset
worth the pain?
• The native toolsets gives absolutely the
best possible results
• But they are hard to use...
o Different/weird
• From first principles people gravitate
towards cross-platform...
o In the long-term, "going native" might be best
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27. Blending
• In-house apps you have more control of
the audience…
– Enterprise supplied iPads, variety of BYOD
smartphones, or…
– BYOD policy supports Android and iOS only,
etc.
• Your approach could be to blend…
– Target primary platform(s) with native (or
shimmed)
– Web or VDI deployment to secondary
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28. Private app delivery
• “Sideloading”
– As opposed to “downloading”
• iOS
– Special enterprise program
– $300 a year
• Android
– Turn off device security, install from APK
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29. Private app delivery on
Windows
• Windows Store apps
– Sideloading enabled as part of volume
licensing
– Alternatively, buy a “sideloading key”
– Windows RT
• Has to be pushed with Windows Intune
– Windows 8
• Pushed with Intune, or PowerShell, etc.
• Windows Phone
– Has to be pushed with Windows Intune
In-house post-PC apps for the enterprise 29

30. Delivering solutions
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31. What does BYOD mean?
• “Bring your own device”
– But is that actually what’s happening?
• The reverse is true…
– Employees are taking your data to their device
• Sociologically interesting…
– Employee now has data wherever and
“whenever”
they are
In-house post-PC apps for the enterprise 31

32. Work/life balance
• Checking your email when out for dinner
with your spouse…
– Used to be technically and sociologically
complicated
– Now it’s just sociologically complicated
• How can you take advantage of people
who perform outside of the boundaries of
work?
– Work/life balance is not structured in an
obvious way
In-house post-PC apps for the enterprise 32

33. What does MDM do?
• Enterprises were tooled up to manage Windows
devices…
– And mobile arrived!
– First purpose is to close that gap
– Second purpose is to provide for BYOD
• Features
– Provisioning
– App distribution
– Document lockers
– Security
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34. MDM pricing
• About £5 per device per month
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35. Provisioning with MDM
• The process of getting the device onto the
network…
– Have to install a bootstrapper
– Apply policy, e.g. encryption, passcode
– Automatic setup of email profiles,
VPN profiles etc
– Automatic installation of apps
• If you’re buying enough, the bootstrapper
can be installed by the retailer
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36. App distribution with MDM
• Typically follows an “app store” metaphor
• Functions…
– Whitelisting
– Blacklisting
– Required apps
– Optional apps
– Sideloading
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37. Document lockers with MDM
• Secure container for managing documents
– Sync with in-house systems
• SharePoint, file shares
– Remote wipe
– Additional encryption
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38. Security with MDM
• Enforced encryption
• GPS tracking
• Remote wipe
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39. How mature is the MDM
market?
• This market is now very mature for iOS and
Android…
– AirWatch
– MobileIron
– Good Technology
• It is less mature for Windows and
BlackBerry…
– Windows Intune
• Windows Phone, Windows 8, Windows RT
– BlackBerry Enterprise Services 10
• Nee “Mobile Fusion”
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40. BlackBerry Secure Work Space
• Interesting new product this year…
– BlackBerry’s trick was always that devices
connect behind the firewall
– BB10 devices with BES10 do this today
– “Secure Work Space” will let iOS and Android
devices do this too
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41. Q&A
• Matt Baxter-Reynolds (mbrit)
– Twitter: @mbrit
– Email: matt@theplatform.io
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