Many organizations are facing a crushing backlog of development request for mobile applications, driven by the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) movement and the competitive pressure to make field sales and service people more efficient.

The problem is that many vendors’ mobile apps aren’t all that good. And even the ones that are don’t integrate seamlessly with apps from other vendors. That’s important for field workers who don’t want to be bothered thumbing through pages and sub menus in order to get at the information they need.

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. faced that problem when trying to equip its 4,300 field workers with the necessary software to file purchase orders, expense reports and other operational documents to its Oracle ERP systems. Oracle’s mobile offering for the version of Oracle ERP that Brocade was using was quite limited at the time, recalled Brocade CIO Ari Bose (right). Plenty of vendors were willing to build a custom app, but Brocade didn’t need an elegant solution.

“Our goal was to get up and running quickly and not get into a lot of development work,” he said. “We didn’t want to set up a lot of infrastructure.”

The solution proposed by Capriza, Inc. fit the bill. The firm’s toolkit uses a virtual browser in the cloud that acts as an intermediary between data, screens and interactions on a mobile device and back-end applications. Its mobile skins, called “Zapps,” overlay mobile screens and navigation techniques on the cloud application to deliver only the functions mobile users need. Multiple back-end applications can be combined in this way.

“Capriza has pre-built apps to do the functions we needed,” Bose said. “All we had to do was provide the pipe between the ERP and the cloud.”

Training consisted of a few webinars and some written instructions in newsletters and on the company intranet. “It was very fast,” Bose remembered, “and the adoption rate was very high. Usually, onboarding the last 20 percent of people takes 80 percent of the time. It took us only five weeks to get completely deployed.”

Users now log purchase orders and requisitions immediately from their mobile devices rather than waiting until they get to their desks. The flexibility of the Capriza system enables Brocade to apply the tool to other back-end systems as well, effectively creating custom skins that unify multiple server  applications.

“We use Salesforce and a bunch of other solutions. If we were going to deploy all of those native mobile apps the users would be overwhelmed,” Bose said. “This consolidates everything into one corporate app.”

In the next fiscal year, Brocade plans to converge functionality from Salesforce.com with quotas, commissions, opportunities and management dashboards. Nearly 40 applications in all are being considered for mobile-enablement. Bose thinks Capriza can be the glue between them. “It takes all the complexity of the process,” he said.

Photo by Hans via Pixabay