This article by Computerworld’s Chris Kanaracus signals how quickly the locked down world of enterprise IT is being transformed by the forces of RC. The gist of the report is that Business Intelligence giant, Microstrategy, after a few years of offering access to a static roster of reports through BlackBerry’s, has launched a new mobile application for iPhones and iPads.

The philosophy is to let users (or system integrators) take advantage of increased real estate “on the glass”, along with increased processing power of the new devices, to give the application “virtually any look and feel”.

The following paragraph stood out:

Microstrategy anticipates that customers will end up creating internal “app factories” enabled by the vendor’s mobile framework, said Sanju Bansal, executive vice president and chief operating officer.

That’s the language of RC, each user can build his or her own mashup of information and data. Under the hood, the application makes judicious use of “user-role identification, auto-location detection through GPS data and a barcode scanning feature that employs the phone’s camera.”

The use case mentioned by Kanaracus involves the hospitality industry, where a general manager can get quick access to key financial performance variables, such as the mix of room rates or other revenue drivers. But what really captured my imagination (as the platform battle between Android and iOS looms so large among developers) is the comment by Jon Gorman, CTO of Alloso Technologies, praising Apple’s locked-down approach to iPhone development. Gorman notes that the refresh times between OS releases “has allowed time for the APIs (application programming interfaces) to stabilize.”

BI is a field with significant revenue potential. According to the article, per-user license fees for mobile Microstrategy range from $550 to $2,000, although the company is priming the pump by offering 25 free perpetual licenses to selected customers.

Categories: Articles

Tags: business intelligence, mobile applications, Enterprise Software, Microstrategy