Mobile Technology: Binding Social and Cloud into a New Enterprise Applications Platform

Nowadays, the IT industry is revolving around the build-out and adoption of a new platform, characterized by mobility, cloud-based application and service delivery, and value-generating overlays of social business and pervasive analytics. The paper explores the convergence of mobile, cloud, and social, as well as the effects for the enterprise and the emergence of the new enterprise application platforms. In the beginning we set the stage, while showing the expansion of the mobile, cloud, and social in the business information system, as they were found in the literature. We then look over the IT trends, especially the consumerization of IT, as reasons and basis for the information systems embracing of mobile. Afterwards, we present a mobility roadmap for the enterprise and illustrate the reconfiguration of the enterprise application platform.


Introduction
The changes set in motion by the Internet and the web technologies are irreversible and have strong impact, but it will take more time to diffuse through organizations.Migrating from old to new ways of doing business has always been a continuous, open-ended process [1].We have witnessed so many IT trends in the last 20 years and we believe that none was as pervasive as mobile technology.The ability to access any content, on any device over any network in any location, is becoming a reality.While the whole IT budget is either same or declining, the one bright point is mobility.According to some studies, in 2011 and 2012, mobility budgets were 40% larger than in 2010 [2].Organizations consider the enlargement of the number of employees with smartphones (from less than 50% in 2010 to over 70% by 2013), which triggers the raise of the number of devices requiring support (Apple, Android-based and RIM devices, as well as tablets) and the associated costs.The new environment demands to deliver services to employees in a mobile cloud computing model.
Social networking evolved massively in the last few years, at an incredible pace and became the preferred way of interaction, sharing and collaboration between people.Particularly, the last few years repositioned the interaction and sharing on the mobile devices.According to some studies, 60% of Facebook updates are from mobile devices and around 80% of staff members are using their phones and other devices for both work and personal purposes and these figures must prompt the managers' interest and reconfigure the enterprise information architecture [3].Passing over the social networks, other social technologies like blogs, wikis, emeetings, instant messaging or document sharing are noteworthy instruments for employees to collaborate and come upon innovation.From the business point of view, the wireless access ubiquity, the proliferation of mobile devices and the urgency to keep business moving have brought the mobile technology in the enterprise information system.From the users and consumers point of view, their real-time, continuous collaboration and their new behavior combined with the first two arguments have brought the social in the enter- This blend of social capabilities, mobile technology and cloud computing materialize into a new platform that forms the basis of a new information system [4].The interdependency is illustrated in Figure 1, where we also considered the position and the role of the enterprise applications.Subsequently, we aim to discuss the concepts and point out the influence of the mentioned key technologies and then consider the estimated transformation and a roadmap for the enterprise mobility.

Literature Review
The Information Technology landscape is at the dawn of a radical change in response to a new set of business realities.The nature of work (how and where it gets done), the expectations of a new generation of workers (accustomed to an "always-on/always connected" electronic lifestyle), and emerging business models that challenge traditional concepts of IT cost and time-to-value are driving the change.In response, mobile computing, cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery and social business collaboration technologies are rapidly gaining momentum in the enterprise information systems.Mobile computing continues to emerge as a subject of substantial industrial and academic interest and the meaning and scope of mobile computing continues to be debated.This area is covered in the literature with books defined as "complete reference guide" or books which focus on a specific mobile subject.Cloud computing has became very attractive for companies in the last five years, therefore the literature is very generous, offering a lot of articles and books, most of them dedicated to managers in order to understand the concept and how can it be employed.We cite here the books: Velte A., Velte

Key Technology Trends and Their Consequences for the Enterprise Applications Landscape
As we already mentioned, the current landscape of the business information system is under the influence of mobility and one main generator was the consumerization of IT.Usually, adoption of IT was started by army or other government institutions followed by the business organizations.Those technologies were not many (low volume) and were expensive.Only over a consistent period of time, costs went down and technologies became affordable for the individual consumer.At present the direction of technology absorption has reversed because many of the most modern technologies are adopted by the individual consumer first.The trend was named consumerization of IT.The number of active mobile applications users is currently over 1 billion and inflatingthe Yankee Group estimates that the number of users will surpass 2 billion in a couple of years [7].Strategy Analytics, a reliable forecaster for digital technology adoption, estimates that the total number of apps downloaded reached 32 billion in 2012 from 23 billion in 2011 (cited in [8]).IDC estimates that there are more than 1.2 million apps available for the various mobile operating systems such as iOS and Android in comparison to only 75,000 for PCs.Even if only 100,000 of these are useful in the enterprise, that's more mobile apps that PCbased apps.A 2011 IDC study [9] reveals that the percent of employees that are using their own devices to access business applications has grown from 30% in 2010 at 40% in 2011.Employees are demanding to be able to use their own devices (smartphones and tablets) to access the enterprise information system and perform their business tasks (in this context a new acronym was born: BYOD, standing for Bring Your Own Device).Obviously, these devices are creating many severe security problems for enterprises [10], but the forces of consumerization cannot be stopped.The meeting point of the mobility track which targets collaboration with the enterprise information system which pursues the integration is the enterprise mobile platform, as shown in Figure 2.

Fig. 2. The enterprise mobile platform 4 Enterprise Mobility Based On Cloud and Embedding Social -A Roadmap
Enterprise mobility permits end users to unchain from their desks and PCs.These days, as we showed in the beginning, more employees do work outside the office with smartphones and tablets, sharing and accessing data via cloud services.Enterprise mobility improves employee productivity on one side but creates security risks on the other (dark) side.Due to these tendencies, IT department needs to keep up with the latest mobile computing evolutions: devices, oper-ating systems, mobile apps, tools and platforms, in order to manage, secure and make the most of them.The most frequent motives to invest in mobile solutions are related to customers (improving responsiveness and fostering collaboration), operational efficiency (business processes transformation), and last, but not least, employees (providing mobile access, improving employee productivity, fostering collaboration, improving worklife balance, and even supporting employeepurchased mobile devices for business processes), as shown in Figure 3.There are seven phases in a mobile IT project: a.Alignment of the project with the enterprise mobility strategy.An enterprise must have a long term mobility strategic vision, coupled with a short to mid-term tactical approach meant to link the rapid technology changes with the business goals and the users' requirements [12] This is another problematical phase, due to the diversity of options and the employees' pressure to use their own mobile devices.From the technical point of view, the first choice seems to be the most popular devices and OSs but this is more appropriate when developing for individual consumers.For enterprise applications, technical criteria should be analyzed, as well as users' related issues.The purpose is to ensure a proper management of the devices (staging, monitoring, malfunctioning, etc.) in correlation with their lifecycle.The ideal would be to have a device-agnostic mobile application, which is compatible with most operating systems and may also work on different types of devices, including notebooks, tablet PCs or smartphones [14].e. Back-end integration.It is an essential phase in the economy of the project.A project might fail if the back-end integration doesn't work.The most common used platform is EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) which is a middleware layer in the enterprise information architecture.This middleware layer aggregates data from the back-end (ERP) system and intelligently distributes in the appropriate format to the mobile devices.Having the greater than before number of mobile applications, a new middleware layer is responsible for back-end integration: the MEAP.f.Mobile application development.Lots of mobile apps are developed, but so many of them are poorly designed and fail to deliver functionality.A good mobile application is highly usable, has a proper and accepted way to access information, has a well-designed user interface, and is responsive.The three basic requirements are: user-friendliness, response time and switch between applications, look and feel.Ideally, whether the mobile devices are company-owned or employee-owned, mobile applications should be written once and deployed to many devices via a mobile cloud model (BaaS).g.Mobile application deployment.If the development phase produced a userfriendly and usable application, the deployment will succeed.This phase also includes a change management process.The accomplishment of this phase is substantially dependable on the end-users, which should be involved from the early phases because they may contribute to the development process and the training programs.A representation for the enterprise mobile platform is proposed in Figure 5.

Fig. 5. The enterprise mobile platform
Mobile applications utilize largely the cloud either for computing or for storage.Cloud computing provides services (notifications, location services, photo collection, advertising etc.) and capabilities (e.g.social integration) that go together with the mobile apps on the device.The cloud also cares for the mobile infrastructure: both MEAP and MDM systems may be deployed as virtual images in the cloud.Not as well known as Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS), the Back-End as a Service (BaaS) ecosystem has quickly evolved.BaaS is a model for providing developers with a way to link their mobile applications to back-end cloud storage while also offering features such as user management, file storage and sharing, push notifications, and integration with social networking services [15].Table 1 summarizes the main aspects that are necessitating attention when analyzing the fusion between mobile, social and cloud into an IT platform. connectivity to back-end systems and data;  device diversity and multiple platforms;  high users' expectations;  integration with existing development processes [16].A reliable mobile enterprise applications project has in our opinion two weak spots: integration and security.The first because there's more than just one type of integration involved: one is the connection of new mobile app with the existing systems (integration capabilities between various mobile technologies) and the other concerns the correlation with the existing business processes that it will replace, impact, or improve.Security is perhaps the Achilles' heel, mainly because mobile devices are more exposed to malware and they enable new forms of attack.Ongoing efforts in achieving security are reported [17].

Conclusions
The notorious IT market research company IDC considers that the organizations should shift to "the third platform", which assembles mobility, big data, cloud computing and so-cial media and our research conclusion corroborates with this report.Moreover, IDC predicts that by 2020, likely 60% of IT spending will be on cloud, social, mobility and big data technologies, with "thirdplatform" revenue projected to grow by 12% each year for the next seven years.By comparison, second platform spending -referring to client/server technologies -is only growing by about 1% year over year, according to the same source [18].On the other hand, surveys among IT managers show a reluctance to move the business workflows to mobile devicesconsidering key applications such as ERP, CRM, and HR.Moreover, enterprise applications still aren't moving to the cloud.The applications that are mostly likely to move are those that are already safely in the cloud: email, mobile apps, collaboration and data backup [19].Therefore, we consider that for the moment the mobile enterprise platform looks like in figure 6 and aims to a model based on a mobile middleware like in Figure 5.The ERP, CRM and other enterprise applications are still considered mission-critical systems, so they will probably remain on-premise or migrate to the private cloud. Consumerized IT will be more and more involved in the mobile space;  New opportunities to drive value from mobile technology;  The information system that records will transform into a system of engagement;  Mobile capabilities will become common in operations, commerce, collaboration, and marketing;  Mobile middleware will support multiple platforms and back-end connectivity ;  Development and integration of highquality mobile apps.In the consumer space, mobile devices with mobile applications have an enormous popularity.Today, the personal mobile devices are brought at work, amplifying social networking within the company walls and giving interaction a context.The contextual information generates a massive volume of data that must be gathered and used in order to add value to the business processes and to better serve the customers and the employees.Companies must define a social approach for collecting, managing, protecting, inferring, and performing on the data gathered by means of social interaction through mobile devices.The ubiquity of mobile technologies, the enthusiasm about social and the promise of the cloud have created new opportunities for enterprises to deliver applications that improve customers' service and employees' productivity and efficiency.Our further research intends to answer questions like: What makes some companies so much better at new mobile enterprise than others?What business trends are they seeing that others are not able to observe?How are they leveraging mobile,

1 DOI: 10
.12948/issn14531305/17.2.2013.06prise information system.If we add a fourth ingredientthe cloudwe obtain the entire representation of enterprise mobility.Today the state of the art in business technology is repositioning in "the third platform", which includes mobile devices and applications; the cloud services; the explosive data growth and a new generation of solutions.Let us mention that the first two platforms were: (1) mainframes and terminals and (2) the client-server model supported by the PC.

Fig. 1 .
Fig. 1.The blend of cloud, mobile and social and the enterprise applications

Fig. 4 .
Fig. 4. From enterprise mobility strategy to mobile solution

Fig. 6 .
Fig. 6.The mobile enterprise platform Series like Advanced in Computers, which is the oldest series still being published, covers the developments in mobile in a special volume The Internet and Mobile Technology Van Der Molen F., Get Ready for Cloud Computing (Van Haren Publishing, 2010) and just mention the long list of articles, images and videos available on the web.However, the cloud is in the first place a technical concept, a field where specialists have to operate.The cloud based architecture and computing environment are presented in books like Rittinghouse J. and Ransome J.,