Enterprise App Store for Cross Platforms

Abstract

 Abstract—As mobile devices becoming necessity and popular way for performing certain tasks, it has also impacted on expectation of IT services at enterprises. Employees and entities related to the enterprises are expecting IT departments to adhere to this trend by moving forward with consumer based IT services as conditioned in mobile world. IT heads need to respond to these demands with careful strategies where the solution should cater for various mobile platforms and at the same time without impacting the investment already made on desktops/notebooks by not breaking support on later users. The strategy also should include lower cost of mobile apps development by adopting write once and run anywhere approach. In this paper we discuss a strategy and approach for above stated problem by implementing a prototype model ofenterprise app store. This model is variant of existing app stores where it distributes apps which are mini web based applications that rendered by web client on browsers on various platforms. Our goal is to provide enterprise app store services to seamless mobile and computing devices without multiplying cost. Index Terms—Enterprise app store, mobile enterprise application platform, IT services consumerization. enterprises are beginning to adopt " Bring Your Own Device " BYOD strategy [5], [8]. Wikipedia describes BYOD as policy implementation for permitting employees to bring their personal owned mobile devices (laptops, tablets, and smart phones) to their workplace and to use those devices to access privileged company information and applications [9]. However enterprises are not just targeting at developing mobile apps alone for their operations but rather implementing their own private app store as their distribution channel as suggested in [10]. Implementing private corporate or enterprise app store gives the enterprises the advantages of developing mobile apps of their own standard thus not limited to the established standards by Apple, Google or others. More over having own app store empowers enterprises with absolute control on type of apps to distribute, apps distribution and its lifecycle management. It also enables them greater flexibility for their data access with better protection. Even though there are a lot of benefits on having private app store, however implementing it impose certain challenges. First employees, vendor, suppliers and customer of an enterprise are not limited to use one type of mobile device alone. As such it is important that the single app store is capable for cross mobile device apps distribution. Second it is essential that the apps distributed through this app store also executable on desktop and notebooks as well. This is vital because unlike public app stores where consumers are expected to use mobile devices users at enterprises are bound to use desktops or notebooks to perform certain tasks. Moreover enterprises also want to maximize their huge investment already made on those machines. Third the apps distributed through this app store should adhere to write once and run everywhere strategy meaning the same version of app should be executable on cross devices including desktop or notebook. This is extremely crucial factor for cost saving. Enterprise can save cost on the apps development where apps that developed by developer with particular skill set can be executable on multiple device. This also saves enterprises on complexity of maintaining apps compatibility issue for different devices. An app store that provides solution for the above raised cross platform and cost issue would be ideal for enterprise level implementation. In this paper we are proposing a new model of web based app store for enterprise that is truly cross platform compatible. Section II of this paper will discuss on related works on this area followed by discussion on the work done in Section III. In Section IV we will discuss on our prototype model implementation meanwhile Section V will be on conclusion. II. LITERATURE REVIEW Gartner report [11] indicates that by 2018 25% of large organizations will have strategies to make their corporate