CEO Reflections

Mobile computing is growing

Mobile device usage in businesses is increasing at a fast pace. A good indicator of this (other than a survey we did recently) was a few customer deals last week required us to have a mobile app optimized for the iPad.

A mobile device - phone or tablet - provides a good platform to be able to work remotely. In addition to emails, you can now run an increasing number of corporate applications on your mobile device. Also, being able to access all your files from this device remotely has become a common need. This is what Egnyte provides. As an Egnyte user, the expectation is that you should be able to access files even when you don't have internet connectivity, make changes, and when connectivity is restored have the files sync up to the cloud. However this poses interesting challenges, specifically on iOS4 devices. Apple does not allow file system access across applications. Therefore, it is possible to open any file in a compatible third party app, but not possible for Egnyte to sense the changes made in the app and push the modified file into the cloud. This is not an issue with our Android app.

Rapid mobile computing adoption is pushing the mobile OS providers to add more and more capabilities in terms of faster releases. This puts the onus on application providers like Egnyte to keep pace and keep introducing app enhancements leveraging the new features. The multitude of platforms does make this work harder. I wish we could build on one common code base and magically have the app be deployed on a variety of mobile devices, and equally important, be optimized for that device.