3 Key Benefits of the Icenium Mobile Development Platform for Enterprises

Last week, thousands of developers tuned in to listen to the keynote on yet another exciting Telerik Icenium release. With a plethora of options for mobile development in the market, Icenium has been gaining a great momentum among Telerik’s developer community for its simplicity and cross-platform capabilities. Now with its latest release the product is evolving to become a true enterprise-grade solution. Why? Through talking to our customers and assessing the capabilities of Icenium we have identified three areas where Icenium will benefit the enterprises most.

1.       Leveraging existing skills

Mobile space has become crowded with a variety of tools to address the multi-channel challenge. However, one thing is becoming clear to enterprises as they respond to the demands of their customers and employees to provide mobile connected apps: while these tools do meet the requirements for multi-platform development and variably, provide the capabilities for building rich, connected apps, there is always a steep learning curve that proves to be costly and time-consuming. New IDEs, unfamiliar pre-built forms and APIs, development languages that may not be part of the team skill set – all add up to the time and effort to get an app out the door.

The key philosophical difference of Icenium is that it is built from the ground up to leverage enterprises’ existing resources, skills, infrastructure and workflows for mobile development.  

Familiar IDEs

The recently released Icenium Extension for Visual Studio enables developers to build iOS and Android apps directly in their favorite IDE.  It goes beyond simple plug-in-type integration – developers can easily utilize Visual Studio’s productivity enhancements including extensions such as TypeScript, CoffeeScript, integration with preferred source control systems, advanced code editing features as well as code analysis tools. Imagine adopting a new IDE that has completely new interfaces and tools to do what your developers have been doing for years in Visual Studio!

Familiar development languages

The other important feature of Icenium is that the only skills required to develop an app on it are pure JavaScript and HTML. To create rich UIs, developer need to go no further than the already familiar JQuery Mobile or Kendo UI Mobile and Cordova APIs. Of course, if needed, the Icenium platform is flexible enough to allow integration of existing or creation of new custom Cordova plug-ins as well as leverage our popular Kendo UI libraries.

2.       An end-to-end solution

Icenium is not just a mobile UI development tool. It has evolved to become a truly end-to-end platform with a comprehensive set of cloud services and tools to cover your entire app life-cycle – from design to testing to deployment and run-time analytics.  

Backend-as-a-Service

Our Everlive product, part of the Telerik stack and integrated with Icenium, significantly speeds the development of enterprise apps by providing data storage, user management, push notifications as well as server-code execution. These services can save enterprises time that would have otherwise been spent on setting-up a new server, configuring a secure, scalable database, and writing TONS of server-side code to expose web services.

Testing

Once the app is built and service connections are set up, developers have various options to debug and test their apps. In addition to integrated emulators that let you preview and debug your app as you build it, Telerik provides industry leading testing framework that has been named a visionary in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant  for Integrated Software Quality products and can potentially be integrated with Icenium.

Analytics

Icenium’s integration with yet another cool Telerik product – Eqatec, allows developers to gather facts about their app in real time on any platform! With this tool, you can receive  insight to not only how your app is behaving, but also how the users are interacting with different features. This feature-level insight is invaluable for gauging your app’s usage by a customer and deciding how to evolve it going forward.

 Deployment

One thing developers hassle over when building an app is getting it packaged and ready for publishing. With Icenium’s "build in the cloud" service it is possible in a matter of seconds. How? Icenium lets you store your source files in the cloud and access them from anywhere to publish your app. Further, for iOS Icenium Ion eliminates the need to provision the app before deploying the application to it for testing. Ion enables developers to load applications into the Ion shell for testing and validation on the actual iOS device. In addition, if a developer has to issue a new build for iOS, she can easily configure the certificate in the cloud, dramatically streamlining the publishing process.

Apps

To help you accelerate your mobile projects Icenium is also adding to its arsenal of pre-built apps that will give your developers a head start and save even more time.

3.       Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

This value pillar is really a product of all of the above mentioned benefits and what drives our enterprise customers to evaluate Icenium more closely:

-   Developers leverage existing skills in JavaScript and HTML5 and use familiar tools which helps them ramp up quickly on Icenium and complete a full fleshed app in just a few hours.

-   Coding the app once, and deploying it to multiple channels saves developers time not only during the initial build, but also  as they maintain and support the app over time. If a developer builds an app using individual SDKs and a new upgrade of the apps needs to be published, she needs to update multiple separate code bases using multiple different tools, resulting in a great amount of time spent on manual coding.

-    Icenium has evolved to become a platform that covers the entire app life-cycle, eliminating the need to purchase additional individual products to build, test, publish, and manage the app.  In other words, the low price point of Icenium helps you do much more for less.

Hopefully this makes a good overview to help you assess how Icenium aligns with the key drivers for selecting a mobile development approach:

1) FLEXIBILITY: The ability to easily adapt an app to new and changing mobile platforms
2) TIME TO MARKET: The time it takes to build and deliver an app to mobile users
3) COST: The cost of building a mobile app, in terms of development hours, training, and maintenance
4) PERFORMANCE: The speed and scalability of a mobile app

Icenium is a result of years of Telerik's UI competence married with the best practices in the maturing mobile market. Learn more about Icenium here: http://www.icenium.com/pricing