By Paul Devlin

With almost a third of UK adults now using a smartphone and tablet PCs also growing in use, apps are the technology phenomenon of the moment. There is such an incredible array of games, services, books and newspapers all available in app form and all in a market that did not exist only four years ago.

To give some perspective to the growth of this market, the floor space needed at the recent trade conference Apps World, which has just taken place in London, doubled between 2010 and 2011. In financial terms it estimates indicate that the mobile app industry will be worth £11.2bn by 2012.

Apps mean business

While much of the buzz around apps concentrates on consumer apps, the business world is experiencing its own app revolution. Smartphone and tablet PC penetration in the enterprise is increasingly all the time, with businesses either providing these to employees or implementing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies that allow workers to connect personal devices to work networks.

Smart devices have transformed business intelligence (BI), the practice of analysing business data to make informed and intelligent decisions. Although mobile BI has existed for several years now, the limitations of mobile devices meant that it was really just a watered-down version of desktop BI. Reports, dashboards and graphs designed for a PC screen would be shrunk to fit onto a mobile handset. This meant that information was hard to read and almost impossible to interact with.

But with smart phones and tablet PCs becoming widespread, users have access to data that is presented in a way that is both digestible and actionable. Tablets especially make mobile BI incredibly easy to engage with. The emergence of bespoke apps for these devices means that organisations can build apps based entirely on their own business data and processes.

Such functionality is a major advance, especially when you factor in mobile BI technology that allows mobile apps to include action-taking features, such as entering data, approving requests, adjusting forecasts, and write-back to data sources. All this can be done instantly within an app and without ever needing to return to a desk. This ability for a mobile workforce to take immediate action based on analytical insight is a powerful one and a concept that Starbucks Coffee Company is already testing.

Herbalife

Nutrition products company Herbalife is also benefitting from a bespoke app, having built and deployed a new sales and marketing analysis app for the iPad using the MicroStrategy Mobile platform.

The app, known as Herbalife Mobile Analytics, enables Herbalife to analyse related sales trends and track performance based on various criteria, such as by product or location, to best capitalise on new opportunities. It helps evaluate sales performance across multiple channels (phone, internet, walk-in, etc.) and gauge the success of marketing campaigns across the business. Executives and sales managers are able to track global sales order trends for more than one million orders, and compare sales performance relative to targets by region, country, or warehouse.

Of course, as an iPad app it means that executives are able to access data directly on a daily or monthly basis, anywhere, anytime. Enterprise take-up of tablet PCs and smartphones will only increase and as it does, so will the use of apps like Herbalife Mobile Analytics that deliver such immediate value to a business.

There are so many apps are proving to be popular with consumers, yet in the corporate world apps are fast becoming indispensible business tools that executives use on a daily basis to drive their businesses forward.

About the author

Paul Devlin is UK Manager of MicroStrategy, the world’s largest pure-play BI vendor that works with organisations such as Tesco, Guess and McDonalds. Paul has worked for businesses including SAP and SAS and has a proven track record of leading software businesses to achieve significant revenue and profitability improvements.

About the company

MicroStrategy provides integrated reporting, analysis, and monitoring software that enables companies to analyse the data stored across their enterprise to make better business decisions. MicroStrategy’s business intelligence platform delivers actionable information to business users via e-mail, web, and mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPad, and BlackBerry.

Relevant links: www.microstrategy.co.uk