The data, researchers reveal, clearly demonstrates a “tangled web of applications” within international organizations is getting more and more complex, putting strain on the IT department and stunting digital transformation.

According to the study, over the last three years the number of IT decision makers who believe their business has more applications than it needs has increased from just over a third to nearly half.

Just 37 percent believe the majority of their applications are mission-critical. Nearly three quarters (73 percent) believe that at least one-fifth of their current applications share similar functionality and should be consolidated, and 57 percent believe that at least a fifth of their applications should be retired or replaced.

This isn’t just an IT problem, it’s a business problem, the report summary continues.

The study revealed that 60 per cent of senior IT decision makers believe their departments’ most valuable contribution to the company is introducing new technologies. Indeed, a significant number have already implemented Cloud (56 percent), mobility (54 percent), social (41 percent) and Big Data (34 per cent) solutions. However, without a modernized applications landscape, IT lacks the bandwidth to deliver competitive advantage through these technologies.

“Little wonder 76 percent believe rationalization is important to realizing their company’s objectives,” the summary concludes.

The post Understanding the 'Tangled Web' of IT Applications appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The Q4 2013 Mobility Index reveals what the company calls a “groundbreaking quarter” for enterprise app activations as businesses look to make employees more “collaborative, productive and engaged.”

Overall, the data reveals 54 percent growth in total enterprise application activations quarter over quarter, up from a 43 percent growth rate from Q2 to Q3 of last year.

Additionally, the findings show that businesses with a more established mobile approach are now focused on deploying the types of apps that can increase employee productivity and encourage collaboration, which are ultimately designed to impact business performance.

Custom enterprise app development continued to grow at an astounding 55 percent quarter over quarter, with the greatest amount of growth seen in the business intelligence, secure browser and social business app categories.

“Enterprise mobile app development is on the rise,” explains Maribel Lopez, founder of Lopez Research LLC. “Almost two-thirds of the companies surveyed in the Q4 2013 Lopez Research benchmark plan to mobile-enable at least 5 or more applications in 2014.”

The post New Report Highlights the Rise of the Enterprise App appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Consumers are increasingly turning to recommendation engines, friends, social networking or advertising to discover mobile applications rather than sorting through the thousands of mobile apps available. As a direct result of this, Gartner predicted on Monday that through 2018, less than 0.01 percent of consumer mobile apps will be considered a financial success by their developers.

“The vast number of mobile apps may imply that mobile is a new revenue stream that will bring riches to many,” said Ken Dulaney, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “However, our analysis shows that most mobile applications are not generating profits and that many mobile apps are not designed to generate revenue, but rather are used to build brand recognition and product awareness or are just for fun. Application designers who do not recognize this may find profits elusive.”

In today’s announcement, Dulaney described the mobile application market as “hyperactive” with more than 200 vendors developing mobile application development platforms and millions of developers using these products and open-source tools to build mobile applications.

“There are so many applications that are free and that will never directly generate revenue. Gartner is forecasting that, by 2017, 94.5 percent of downloads will be for free apps,” added Dulaney. “Furthermore, of paid applications, about 90 percent are downloaded less than 500 times per day and make less than $1,250 a day. This is only going to get worse in the future when there will be even greater competition, especially in successful markets.”

The post Gartner: Only a Miniscule Fraction of Mobile Apps Will Ever Be Successful appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Intelligent Living tells MMW that it has formally entered into a multi-year deal with Monster Arts, Inc. for the development of mobile and web accessible games, mobile health and wellness and learning applications.

“We are very committed to building mobile and web based platforms for wellness, mHealth and cognitive learning,” says Josh Eikov, CSO of Intelligent Living.

“With brands such as MIND360, Intelligent Living and Health and Beyond,” he adds, “we see excellent opportunities for this company to position itself as a leader in the field of genre, brand-specific applications. APPZ has a lot of experience and expertise in game and mobile applications development, and we are excited about this partnership and collaboration.”

According to VisionMobile’s 2012 Developer Economics report, the app economy was worth $53 billion and is expected to expand at a 28% Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) up to 2016, reaching $143 billion.

“As a Company that has been very involved in the mobile market we know that mobile healthcare apps and learning games are booming in usage, both by consumers and health care providers, but it’s early days yet for the consumer healthcare industry,” explains Wayne Irving II, CEO of APPZ. “There is a huge potential for mobile apps in patient care much beyond what we are witnessing today. We are very excited to be entering this arena and look forward to a great alliance with Intelligent Living.”

The post Intelligent Living Makes Leap Into Mobile App Industry appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The venerable fast food king is now testing a mobile payment application in Salt Lake City, Utah and in Austin, Texas.

Lisa McComb, a spokeswoman for the company, says this effort could be the start of something big.

“We’re always looking at new technologies to make the McDonald’s experience better for our customers,” McComb said. “We are testing some of these technologies in a few markets, so it’s premature to speculate on the decisions we may make after the tests, but we’re excited to bring a cutting-edge experience in the future to our customers.”

After ordering via a mobile phone, customers can pick up food in stores, curbside or at drive-thru windows, according to notes from a June meeting of McDonald’s franchisees and company executives obtained by Bloomberg News. The system will also include special promotions, offers and a loyalty program.

“You have to look at the whole generation that’s coming up and I think we’re moving to a cashless society,” Bob Goldin, executive vice president at restaurant researcher Technomic Inc., tells Bloomberg. “It’s a worthwhile investment,” for McDonald’s, he says.

If McDonald’s mobile efforts go global, it will represent a massive new reach for mobile into the fast food arena, as the chain now has well over 34,000 locations worldwide.

The post Mobile Orders May Be The Future of McDonald’s appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post from Panos Papadopoulos, CEO and Co-Founder of BugSense.

Many would argue that the mobile platform consolidation in the form of today’s Apple / Google duopoly is a good thing for developers; less choice, but two mature platforms and a billion-smartphones addressable market. Despite the platform consolidation, developers face real challenges not just in developing, but in prototyping, designing, marketing, selling and supporting apps.

The quality bar for apps is increasing; apps need to incorporate more functionality in a slicker UI, in a sexier package (graphical assets and messaging), through the right marketing channels and at the right price, which is usually free-to-try. App consumers are demanding, expecting utility, convenience and easy of use – all at a low or free price point with monetization shifting from paid downloads to advertising and in-app purchases.  Enterprise apps have to talk to legacy systems, be an effective part of a company’s business strategy, enhance brand image, while being secure, reliable and cost efficient to develop and maintain.

To support the 500,000+ mobile developers globally, a new “SDK economy” has emerged to cater to the needs of mobile developers. A storm of over 500 SDK startups and Enterprise IT incumbents, have emerged since 2009 to help developers in everything from app prototyping and debugging, to user analytics, planning tools, and customer support. These days developers can choose from a gazillion tools to monetize their apps, test, monitor app performance, manage security, study user behavior, cross-promote apps to attract & engage users, and manage API use and simplify use of cloud services.

Today most of the supporting infrastructure for app developers resides, within 3rd party developer tools, rather than within the platform itself. This SDK economy has become the critical infrastructure underneath the app economy.

Growth and consolidation in the SDK economy

The SDK economy has seen an impressive amount of growth and consolidation in the last 4 years. It’s also an economy that’s intensely suffering in terms of monetization.

The very first SDKs or tools for mobile developers were App store analytics (tracking sales & downloads) from the likes of Distimo and App Annie. Then came ad networks (mobile-centric like AdMob, acquired by Google), later followed by web ad networks expanding to in-app advertising, with ad networks and servers now in abundant supply. Cross platform tools followed soon after, helping develop apps for more platforms, from a single code base. Led by PhoneGap and Appcelerator, the supply of CPTs has exceeded 50 vendors, practically making this area of the tools economy a red ocean.

Looking for investment opportunities, VCs began investing in the companies that support Enterprise and Consumer mobile app development. The VC capital created value but it also changed developer perceptions of value, by forcing tool vendors to offer base products for free. It also led to a string of acquisitions (see below), as covered in VisionMobile’s Developer Economics 2013 report.

Table: Mergers and Acquisitions in Mobile Developer Tools

There are three reasons behind the consolidation of the SDK economy.

1. Capital changing the perception of value. VC capital allowed tool vendors to offer developer products for free to accelerate user acquisition.
2. The need to subsidize developer onboarding. Developers are always the side of a mobile platform that Apple, Google, Microsoft or BlackBerry will need to subsidies. As a result platform-provided tools will be usually free and 3rd party tools will be prime acquisition targets for platforms themselves.
3. Catering to adjacent developer needs. There are substantial benefits to developers by integrating functionality across tools (e.g. ad networks with user analytics or crash reporting with performance management), which inevitably leads to acquisitions on tools that are adjacent in the developer journey. Catering to adjacent developer needs also helps tool vendors attract and, most importantly, retain their user base.

Who stands to survive and win in this ongoing consolidation of the SDK economy?. As is already evident from the earlier M&A list, consolidation will become clustered around where the developer money is flowing into: App Marketing Services & Enterprise Mobile Services.

App Marketing Services

Mobile Advertising is expected to be a 20B market by 2015.   Traditional ad networks have already ported their existing products – banner advertising – over to mobile in the form of in-app advertising.  This model doesn’t work well yet in mobile and is a factor in why traditional ad networks are not yet profitable.

About The Author

Panos Papadopoulos is CEO and Co-Founder of BugSense. BugSense helps thousands of developers worldwide, including Fortune 500 companies, create better mobile app experiences by harnessing the power of mobile data. BugSense is the leading operational intelligence service for mobile app developers providing real-time insights for Android, iOS, HTML5, WP and Windows 8 using big data analysis. To learn more, please visit bugsense.com.

The post Outlook: The Rise of the Mega SDKs in Mobile appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

On Thursday, Airpush announced what some are calling a major initiative to help eliminate malware distribution.

The announcement came at the SF AppShow where Airpush confirmed its partnership with Appthority, a leading and highly respected expert force in mobile app security.

“Mobile malware has been a thorn in the side of the thriving app ecosystem,” said Kevin Watkins, CTO and co-founder of Appthority. “We are proud to assist Airpush with the technology that improves the state of security across the app world. Airpush is being proactive by attacking the malware problem at its source distribution and that demonstrates their commitment to protecting their customers.”

Airpush says the partnership will integrate Appthority’s mobile security technology directly into the Airpush platform. The result will be a comprehensive scanning of all advertiser app promotions and URLs. This naturally serves as a nice supplementary level of security in Airpush’s manual approval process.

By integrating Appthority’s technology directly into its platform, Airpush has “virtually eliminated the threat of mobile malware distribution via its network of over 50,000 applications.”

To learn more about Airpush, click here.

The post Airpush Teams with Mobile App Security Specialists at Appthority appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The leading provider of insight into the mobile app store marketplace lived up to its stature today with the release of a fascinating new report appropriately titled “The Four Year Anniversary of the Apple App Store.”

In this month’s publication, Distimo takes a look back at how the Apple App Store emerged and developed over the past four years.

The iPhone was released more than five years ago, the report reminds us, but without the ability to install apps. The Apple App Store subsequently launched on July 10, 2008 with only 500 applications available for download.

But that number would soon grow… and grow… and grow.

• The Apple App Store currently has over 650k applications available, however due to emerging competition, the number of downloads among the top 200 most popular applications decreased from 15.4 at its height to 8.4 in July 2012.
•  The United States has been the largest market for iPhone since launch, but has lost some ground in terms of its total significance over the past two years. Approximately 26 percent of the free downloads worldwide originated from the United States in the Apple App Store for iPhone during June 2012.

If you’re interested in reading the full report, you can get it for free on Distimo’s website here.

The post Distimo Revisits The Birth and Evolution of the Apple App Store appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

“The overall app industry improved retention rates 19% over the last year,” writes Daniel Ruby on the Localytics Blog. “App publishers for the iPhone and iPad saw the greatest success, with retention rates 52% higher than those on Android.”

In 2011, for example, 26 percent of downloaded apps didn’t see much use. In fact, they were only used once. During the last year, that percentage has fallen to 22 percent. Perhaps more importantly, however, is that the percentage of installed apps used more than 10 times climbed five percent (from 26% to 31%).

So who’s the biggest winner among platforms in the app retention war?

“iPhone’s far greater app retention rates is also an echo of the 94 percent retention rate of iPhone itself compared to 47 percent for Android,” the Localytics report reads. “When users upgrade from iPhone 3GS to iPhone 4S, they might download the same apps (or transfer them) to their new device. In most cases, that iPhone 4S will look ‘new’ to the app publisher even though the user might have months of prior exposure to the app on the older iPhone 3GS. To correctly identifying returning users across devices, publishers need to record registration data as part of their app analytics.”

To check out the report in full, click here.

The post Localytics Finds That App Retention is Climbing appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.