By Joe Feyas, Consultant
Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its iPhone, while simultaneously defining the future of mobile media and touch computing with the iPad. One reason for the popularity of these devices is the ease of downloading widgets and tools from Apple’s “App Store”, as evidenced by the 650 thousand Apps and over 30 billion downloads as of June 2012.
The App Store is a service that is accessible from a mobile device or even built in and included as a core feature of the device. The service allows users to browse and download applications directly to their device. These apps can have diverse functions which appeal to a broad group of users. The Apps can also range from simplistic to extremely complex, again showing great diversity in the types of users that can be supported
From a business perspective the App Store model makes sense for several reasons. First, it gives new users small easy to use applications with a smaller learning curve. This lessens training time and promotes fast user acceptance of individual tools. Second, is the use of “targeted” applications. That simply means that applications are presented in a way which targets a particular business user or group with a specific functionality. This allows users to focus on the applications that are most pertinent to their task while ignoring the rest. Third, development time can speed up quite a bit. Instead of waiting months or years for a monolithic application to be finished, smaller core offerings can be added to your suite in a relatively short period of time.
Building an App Store with Qlikview is quite easy thanks to some of the core features. The built in Access Point technology makes adding additional offerings a snap. Simply develop a new application, and place it on the access point. Now decide which users need access (or all of them) and Voilà! Your app store has just grown. Also by using a “shared” data model, in which the data is loaded then stored to a QVD and kept separate from the GUI, many different applications can use that same data without a great amount of incremental development. These particular points make an App Store model a highly scalable solution for your business needs.
About the Author
Joe Feyas is a Consultant at Bardess with 20 years of experience in technology related fields. His focus is providing clients the software and expertise they need to promote effective business solutions. He comes to Bardess with extensive experience in developing Enterprise level software systems. He graduated from Rutgers University with a B.A. in Computer Science and Economics.
