Enterprise mobility is booming. Gartner forecasts that by the end of 2017 market demand for enterprise mobile app development services will grow at least five times faster than internal IT organizations’ capacity to deliver them. To help its customers meet the demand, Oracle has partnered with Xamarin, a hugely popular mobile development platform, to allow joint customers to build fully native, cloud-connected apps quickly. Now, enterprises can build high-performance apps for all platforms using Xamarin, and integrate to back-end systems with Oracle Mobile Cloud Service.
In a recent webcast, “Go Native Fast with Xamarin,” Rimi Bewtra, Oracle’s senior director of product marketing, and Nat Friedman, CEO and cofounder of Xamarin, explored the enterprise mobile market and how the partnership positions customers for success. Here are the highlights:
Bewtra: What’s the best way to approach enterprise mobile challenges?
Friedman: Given all the complexity inherent to mobile development, a company’s competitive advantage lies in reaching, engaging, and retaining more mobile users. This starts and ends with a great, native user experience.
For that to happen, enterprise apps need three things. First, a consumer-grade front end. We’ve found that 60 percent of all mobile users abandon apps that don’t load in three seconds, and 43 percent will never return. That needs to be driven by an enterprise-grade back end that mobilizes enterprise data safely and securely. And a mobile development lifecycle to build, test, and monitor apps efficiently enough to accelerate time to market and ensure app adoption.
See this conversation and many other informative speakers on the Cloud Platform webcast series.
Bewtra: What trends are you seeing with your customers in their approach to addressing demand for mobile apps?
Friedman: It’s challenging—you have a highly fragmented mobile market, a huge developer shortage, and new frameworks for building mobile apps. That’s where Xamarin and Oracle come in. Oracle’s mobile strategy with Oracle Mobile Cloud Service is about allowing developers to build their mobile apps on any app development platform. As the leading cross-platform mobile app development solution for C# developers, we want to make it fast and easy for our customers to build high-quality, high-performance apps. Our strategic partnership means that developers easily connect their fully native Xamarin apps to Mobile Cloud Service to power their apps’ back end.
Bewtra: Tell us more about Xamarin.
Friedman: We’re taking tens of thousands of companies mobile with our development platform that turns 6 million C# developers into native iOS and Android developers. With Xamarin, our customers build 100 percent native iOS, Android, and Windows apps from a single shared C# codebase—which accelerates time to market. Customers, employees, and vendors expect a fluid UI and fast load times, and Xamarin allows enterprises to bring these innovative mobile experiences to life with fully native mobile apps that work on any device. Our customers use mobile to drive business goals with customer loyalty apps, to enable home energy efficiency, to improve in-flight operations by allowing flight crews to accept ApplePay for purchases, and even to help the hearing impaired better engage with the world around them.
Bewtra: What does the Xamarin and Oracle Mobile Cloud Service integration allow joint customers to do?
Friedman: Our partnership combines Oracle’s leadership in enterprise integrations, security, and analytics with Xamarin’s success in mobile app development, delivering a complete end-to-end solution. Xamarin provides the consumer-grade front end that lets you develop fully native apps in all three ways: native UI, native performance, and access to all device-specific APIs. With the Xamarin SDK for Oracle Mobile Cloud Service, enterprises then easily connect to Oracle Mobile Cloud Service on the back end. With the SDK, enterprises include MCS like push, authentication, storage, enterprise endpoints, CRM, ERP, diagnostics, and analytics with a few lines of additional code. As a result, enterprises are positioned to transform their businesses quickly and scale for the future—and that’s what we’re here to do.
Bewtra: Why partner with Oracle? What’s most compelling about the Oracle Mobile platform?
Friedman: Oracle is laser-focused on apps, shifting from its huge on-premises footprint to the cloud. In fact, we’ve seen how agile Oracle’s cloud is firsthand—we started this relationship in early March and now, within a couple of months, we already have complete end-to-end integrated solution and demo apps.
On top of that, both Xamarin and Oracle are hyper-focused on solving business problems and creating new opportunities through mobile. We also share a mutual focus on UX: Developers love using Xamarin and, with the Oracle Mobile Cloud Service persona-based workflow, it’s easy for developers to be productive immediately.
The bottom line is, we want to empower each of our customers with everything they need to build their next 100-plus apps—their mobile strategy—and, together, Xamarin and Oracle Mobile Cloud Service make this possible.
Read more about the partnership in the Business Insider
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