3 Ways To Update Your Enterprise Application Development Environment

The enterprise world is becoming more mobile by the second. Recent research from Evans Data found that 8.7 million of the 19 million software developers in the world now focus on creating applications for mobile devices. You want your business to keep pace, but it’s difficult for IT departments to balance multiple application development projects with a finite amount of time and money. So what do you do? Instead of managing your resources, improve them with an enhanced mobile application development environment.

Enhancing your development tools speeds up the design process and saves money by reducing the number of hours allocated for expensive programmers. Aside from cost and timing, product quality and usability also improves when integrating cloud data services through vast catalogs of API plug-ins. There’s no need to hire scarce native mobile developers when a modern, mobile platform enables you to leverage existing web developers.

How do you choose the right development environment?  To find a solution that fits your budget and development needs, look for an environment based on the following factors:

Design & Usability

A poorly designed application can greatly hinder usability, efficiency and adoptability among end-users. When searching for a solution, look for an environment that has an intuitive integrated development environment (IDE), which provides deep level access to elements such as the source code. This feature gives developers the best of both worlds: simplicity and flexibility, ensuring you deliver intuitive applications that are easily adopted by end-users.

Integration through a complete platform

In the Internet of Things (IoT) connected world, integrating with and utilizing cloud-based services and enterprise systems is key. Many traditional mobile development platforms require multiple downloads of SDK tools, hurting innovation as organizations lose time maintaining various design platform infrastructures. With a strong cloud-based development environment, users can spend more time collaborating, as the tools needed for development are stored in the cloud and accessible from any computer with an internet connection. A strong development environment should have a wide variety of diverse and easy-to-use API plug-ins and back-end services to make connecting to existing and future data sources easier. Non-cloud development environments cost businesses valuable time because developers separately select and manually integrate such components.

And finally…

Support

Unfortunately, we’ve probably all experienced poor customer service when reaching out for technical support. As anxiety builds and deadlines creep closer, nothing is more frustrating than finding out that the development environment you have chosen is lackluster in the support arena, a frustration that can’t afford to happen. The right environment solution should provide multiple channels of support, have a clean track record and present themselves as thought-leaders in the space.

So take a step back and look carefully when you’re assessing your enterprise app development platform. By taking the time to research application environments with these three factors in mind you’ll be on your way to enhancing your development process and producing the award winning applications you know your organization is capable of.

About the Author: Fima Katz is the President and CEO of Exadel, a company improving how businesses develop mission-critical business applications and maker of Appery.io , a cloud-based mobile app development platform. Fima has over 20 years of experience in the IT industry, making him an expert in the  design of complex, mission-critical distributed object (CORBA/DCOM) systems and the integration of complex legacy enterprise systems into business services.