IT Gets User Friendly

As the consumerization of IT continues to change the landscape of enterprise technology and the coinciding trend of mobile applications surges, will employees begin to expect a series of easily accessible applications customized to their enterprise? An interesting post from CIO’s Shane O’Neil brings light upon the emerging demand for a custom enterprise app store.

Depending on the current IT environment, this dream may be difficult to execute, but large organizations can better manage the way employees use their technology if they offer a convenient way of attaining, managing and updating it. Specifically, when it comes to mobile applications, where numerous options from Apple, Android, and Blackberry are used in conjunction with enterprise applications, does an enterprise AppStore make the most sense.

A Common User Experience

Enterprise IT systems are moving towards a common user interface customized to their brand aesthetic. In other words, every system a company uses will look, feel, and work in a similar fashion (at least on the top interface level). If this is the case, an enterprise AppStore full of apps and add-ons would be a logical method of distributing and managing applications and components of applications.

Mendix was recently mentioned in a nice post on the GetApp blog about the top cloud stories in 2010. Always happy to hear from our friends at GetApp, we’re even more excited to start seeing Mendix apps populate the GetApp marketplace now that Mendix is listed as a platform. The enterprise world has gone app crazy this year, and I’m proud to hear that Mendix apps are regarded as true game-changers by their users.

If you’re not familiar with GetApp, it’s an enormous marketplace for business applications of all kinds. Talk about options – there are thousands of apps for every purpose, ranging in every possible characteristic you can imagine. The sheer number of choices here reminds me of the philosophy of the Long Tail. You think there will be a long tail of apps?

The Long Tail

In his book, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson explains the value in harnessing the web for free distribution of content. The long tail philosophy refers to a normal distribution of goods, where most merchants are selling those that are in highest demand; the aggregate value of goods not being sold is actually larger than that of the limited number of high-demand goods.