Mobilising enterprise applications

With the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement penetrating ever-deeper into the operations of many enterprises, the ability to add mobile capabilities to existing applications becomes an increasingly important task. If that can then be achieved with the addition of policy controls to avoid misuse of the applications or data, then so much the better.

This is what users can now get with the announcement that Webalo has integrated its cloud-based, self-service enterprise mobility platform with MobileIron’s AppConnect, and become a full-blown member of the AppConnect ecosystem. The Webalo platform provides employees with a cloud-based platform for quickly and easily configuring and deploying bi-directional, transactional, interactive enterprise-to-mobile capabilities, at very low cost per application. And now it is integrated with MobileIron AppConnect, it gives enterprise IT departments the policy controls it needs to secure and manage corporate data.

Webalo is said to be 100x faster than traditional mobile application development. It is also simple enough for business users to master, yet powerful enough to allow users to take actions directly from their smartphones and tablets. It runs on all the major platforms, including Android, Apple, BlackBerry, and Windows smartphones, tablets, and desktops.

It allows CIOs to significantly scale mobile app development with minimal resources and provides corporate IT with the tools needed to allow business units and departments to add mobile capabilities to enterprise applications and data themselves, relieving the burden on corporate IT.

"There are several options organizations can use for mobilizing corporate data and traditional desktop applications," said Eric Klein, Enterprise Mobility Software Analyst at VDC Research. "To date, however, many vendors have utilised a highly structured approach that relies on programming skills and that can lock an organisation into using that approach. Webalo's automated approach to app development is both flexible and unique and is very synergistic with partners like MobileIron."

MobileIron has a track record in security and management for mobile apps, documents, and devices, and provides its AppConnect technology to third party mobile app developers. With this, companies can give their employees apps that have been enabled with auto-configuration, data containerisation, and secure tunneling to protect corporate data.

As part of the ecosystem of apps, Webalo aims to provide MobileIron customers with a seamless user experience for securely accessing and sharing enterprise applications and data on mobile devices. The company claims it can deliver a virtually instantaneous ROI and gives businesses a single enterprise mobility platform for generating, securing, and managing apps and content on both iOS and Android smartphones and tablets.

“Keeping pace with changing mobile technology is difficult for any IT organisation,” said Ojas Rege, VP Strategy, MobileIron. “The ability of Webalo to provide a quality mobile experience for existing enterprise services combined with the strong policy and security framework of MobileIron AppConnect allows customers to mobilise their most important business processes quickly and securely.”

The integration of Webalo with MobileIron AppConnect delivers while letting IT administrators manage content policies and access controls at the enterprise level. IT administrators can set policies for content security, including the ability to selectively wipe the app container and all its contents without affecting other device data.

“Making our enterprise mobility platform available through MobileIron’s AppConnect ecosystem will greatly expand customers’ mobile options,” said Peter Price, Co-Founder and CEO of Webalo. “The Webalo platform is easy for anyone to master, and its automation capabilities work out-of-the-box, as part of the MobileIron infrastructure, delivering enterprise mobility 100 times faster and at a fraction of the cost of traditional mobile application development tools.”