A Solutions Approach to App Development

Today, businesses are looking to modernize, and deliver information more quickly to the customer. They want to mobilize their applications, stay agile and go to market quickly, and we think a solutions approach may be the key. Here’s why.

Building an application is challenging, because it requires selecting from multiple tools and products, deciding on the right development approach, getting a team in place that has expertise in a host of technologies--everything from UI, to testing and build tools, to integration to backend systems. Lastly, it requires assessing the appropriate enterprise architecture, then actually building, integrating, testing and deploying the app. The entire process, from start to finish, is full of anxiety about how or if the application will be adopted. For all these reasons, it’s best to focus on a solutions approach.

The Answer: Solutions

So what is a solutions approach? It’s one that leverages a pre-defined or pre-configured set of functionality that help solve a "business problem" and deliver measurable business value. Solutions include processes, technologies and best practices, and they can also include services for faster implementations. Sometimes also called pre-build applications, app accelerators or app templates, solutions are increasingly necessary to jump-start the app development process and shorten time to market.

Decisions, Decisions

At Telerik, the “solution” is an important part of the overall mobile strategy.  We've taken the solutions approach to bring pieces of the technology puzzle together for you.

Let’s review the mobile application development process, which requires many decisions. First, you have to decide on hybrid or native or mobile web (responsive). Second, you’ll need to have on-hand the appropriate tools for the approach you select, as well as the appropriate development environment for those tools. This encompasses user Interfaces, mBaaS/data integration/connectivity  to various backend systems,  offline scenarios, notifications services, testing tools to test against 100s of devices , deployment options (device management) and analytics to track app usage. Then you must select a deployment option: on-premise/cloud/private cloud.

Each tool provides pros and cons, and working with and integrating every tool requires massive and expensive manpower.  Each tool has its own set of best practices for maximizing functionality.

Telerik tightly integrates all tools needed for building apps into a single-stack solution. We brought together our expert tools mobile development platform, keeping developer productivity in mind.

As a part of our solution strategy, we maximize use of open technologies and champion open source to ensure we play well with a variety of other technologies.  We continue to aspire to improve productivity. We have expanded the eco system by introducing Plugins Marketplace, which is verified by Telerik for hybrid plugins.

Meeting Business Needs

To optimize productivity, we shifted the focus to business users (so-called “business developers” or “citizen developers”) and introduced Teleirk ScreenBuilder. Business users don’t know how to write code; however, they do understand the "business" and their own backend ERP systems. By providing pre-defined templates and guiding them through the best practices for UI—from theme selection to layouts—and enabling them to connect to the backend system via data connectors (REST/ODATA and the like), we provide a pre-built application with auto-generated code. Users can choose whether to generate “Hybrid” or “Native” code for their app.

The solutions approach enables business developers to get mobile business applications up and running in weeks instead of months. Traditional implementations
an be slow and costly, but these preconfigured software and service packages simplify delivery, using best practices to deploy quickly, predictably and affordably. It also enhances collaboration between business users and the developer community, eliminating risk associated with “going live.”

Telerik Platform provides several pre-defined templates/sample applications based on
best practices, to jump-start your application development. Benefits include:

• Expert consulting isn’t required, because the technologies are proven and p
• re-integrated
• Open source provides agility, faster time-to-market and reduced costs, because developers aren’t locked down into a single technology
• Adoption is easier and more predictable
• Best practices can be leveraged across industries or LOBs

As vendors mature and business demand grows, the solutions approach will continue to gain momentum, enabling technology standardization, and faster development and deployment.