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Innovation through Mobility has tremendous Potential

Ramesh Balan
Ramesh Balan
CEO, UltiMeta Software
Balan is a seasoned entrepreneur and a visionary software architect. Successfully boot-strapped t... more>>
Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, UltiMeta Software (formerly Inspherion Corporation) delivers enterprise-level business process automation (BPA) solutions. Ramesh Balan, CEO of Ultimeta founded the firm in 2006 over the past 5 years, Ramesh and his core team of developers have worked relentlessly alongside customers in multiple industries to create EASE software, the first and only Meta Application for BPA that virtually eliminates manual software coding to create an enterprise application.

Mobility is playing a key role in transforming businesses across many industries. Business innovation through mobility has tremendous potential to improve the productivity of mobile employees as well as create greater levels of engagement with customers – resulting in a more agile and profitable business. Businesses are continually looking for opportunities to gain a deeper understanding of customer buying patterns and preferences, which can in turn translate into focused marketing efforts to grow revenue. The explosion in the smart phone and tablet technologies provide the perfect back drop for mobile application and mobile application platform companies to help enterprises with this transformation. From the enterprise CIOs perspective, until now, solving enterprise application needs with either custom mobile or packaged mobile software has been a time-consuming, risky, and costly exercise. This is further complicated by the various mobile device platforms (iOS, Android, Windows), as well as the many application types that must be supported (Desktop, Web, Native and Hybrid mobile).Enterprises simply cannot afford the cost and the time it takes to achieve the results by following this approach. The key trend in the mobile application enablement in enterprises is about to shift from being able to build mobile applications from scratch one at a time and building it separately on each platform to a more unified platform different approach.

Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms (also known as MEAPs) offer a solution by leveraging the latest in the HTML5 standards to provide a cross-platform approach. This approach offers certain cost and time savings with respect to building certain type of mobile web and hybrid applications that is based on the HTML5 standard.

The next generation of MEAPs will address some of the short comings of the first generation MEAP products that are in the market place today. This new category of platforms will represent a huge technological breakthrough as it will offer enterprises the flexibility to support the development of cross-platform native applications that are not based on the HTML5 standard. This will provide the same cost and time efficiencies associated with using the MEAP platform while providing the unmatched user experience that can be achieved only with developing a native mobile application.

While we are at a period where there is enormous opportunity to innovate and create value, today’s entrepreneur must be extremely focused and disciplined to translate their ideas into a successful and sustainable venture. The key challenge is to clearly be able to identify and articulate the scope of the problem that they are looking to solve for the customer, and how that will create value in the marketplace. Further, the entrepreneur will need to be able to clearly differentiate their solution in an already crowded marketplace, and be able to establish their brand as the solution of choice for the customer. In order to succeed, the entrepreneur must be able to create a market entry strategy that will introduce a minimum viable product, while still being able to demonstrate sufficient value for the customer as well as clear differentiation in the market place. The second element that is a key challenge that determines the success of an entrepreneur is their ability to assemble a solid team that can execute on their vision. The third challenge is of course finding sufficient capital to execute their vision.
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