I recently had the pleasure of speaking at the CTO Forum’s “RETHINK Transforming IT Systems, Data and Technology Operations”. It was a great conference with more than 100 CTO/CIO’s in attendance.

There was a lot of discussion and questions about enterprise mobility at the conference. In upcoming blog posts, I’ll review the three top topics that came up in my conversations with clients, prospects and industry experts. Here’s the third:

How can I be expected to take my enterprise mobile when I support over 500 Window and Web applications?

The above question—and the alarm and suspicion behind it—is understandable, given the math. For example:

  • The above figure, believe it or not, is conservative: many enterprises report having up to 5000 apps running (and needing support).
  • Custom coding even a single business-critical app (such as ORACLE or SAP) will take 6-12 months to execute and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
  • Mobile coders are an expensive and finite resource. Mobilizing even a handful of these apps will not only break the budget—it will also exhaust these important development resources.

Another option available to enterprise IT is a new set of companies that are marketing themselves as ‘rapid-deployment.’ But these options, for the most part, involve force-fitting a desktop on a mobile device, with none of the internal logic or native experience preserved. The result, if the mobilization process gets to the finished line, is an awkward app with limited user acceptance, resulting in lost productivity.

We founded PowWow Mobile on the premise that there needed to be a Third Way: “Enterprise Application Transformation. By ‘transforming’ their apps (instead of redeveloping them) using our patented Deconstruct/Transform/Reconstruct, enterprises can mobilize multiple apps at a time—at a fraction of the cost and time of custom coding.

Learn more about Enterprise Application Transformation.