The case for a corporate mobile app store - Tata Tele Business Services

By Ashwani Mishra, ETCIO.com

Apple created a revolution with its app store, and consumers fell in love with it. Other players like Amazon, Google and Microsoft soon rushed with similar offerings for their customers.

In a world where just about everyone is familiar with app stores, it shouldn't take a whole lot of convincing executives and employees of the need to make your own corporate services, apps, and APIs available through a similar setup – a dedicated enterprise app store.

A Gartner report had suggested that enterprise app stores promise greater control over the apps used by employees, greater control over software expenditures and greater negotiating leverage with app vendors, but this greater control is only possible if the enterprise app store is widely adopted. Apps downloaded from public app stores for mobile devices disrupt IT security, application and procurement strategies.

In addition, an enterprise app store also provides stronger security features to control and protect mobile apps and data. This can help businesses to manage application inventory, identify approved applications and blacklist apps that may contain malware or other malicious content.

Often, we tend to look at an enterprise full of different devices, both owned by employees and issued by the company, as a hardware problem. But really, devices don't matter; it’s the data. And enterprise app stores cut right to the heart of the problem.

Bring your own application (BYOA) has become as important as bring your own device (BYOD) in the development of a comprehensive mobile strategy, and the trend toward BYOA has begun to affect desktop and Web applications as well.

An app store will truly be a great way for IT to share new applications within the enterprise, recognize great applications, provide feedback to development teams and even create a bit of competition between them - all to drive the development of better solutions.

The enterprise app store can become a one-stop shop for all the tools and data employees need to do their jobs.