Hewlett-Packard has updated a number of its software packages and services to help developers and IT managers modernize their applications so they will better fit into today's always connected environment.
Enterprise software users now "interact with consumer apps constantly, and those experiences are shaping the demands on the enterprise applications they use as well," said Franklin Grosvenor, HP's vice president for enterprise mobility and social business services.
In a recent survey conducted on behalf of HP, nearly 80 percent of corporate chief marketing officers expressed frustration in how badly designed customer-facing enterprise applications were, from the perspective of the users.
Today's enterprise software developer has a different set of requirements than in years past, Grosvenor explained.
"Historically, most enterprise application developers start with a set of features and functions they have to deliver. This is starting to change," Grosvenor said. "Increasingly, the demand is to deliver a business outcome and a desired experience to the user. You do that through orchestrating features and functions in a way that is compelling."
To this end, the company has added more user interface expertise to its consulting practice. The HP User Experience Design Services, part of the company's consulting service, can help walk organizations through the process of building user-friendly enterprise applications.
"The user experience transcends the data, or the user interface. It's not the font size or the color schemes that you paint over top of the application. It is how the user moves through an application in a way that is intuitive. [Users] shouldn't have to sit through classroom training or pour through online training to understand what to do next," Grosvenor said.
The consulting service interviews end users -- either customers or employees -- to determine their needs, as well as works to understand the client's business process and IT infrastructure. The results of this research, which can be part of an organization's application modernization project, can speed the process of designing an appealing, productive application, Grosvenor said.
On the software side, the company has updated a number of its applications that address both development and operational performance of enterprise applications.
One application that has been updated has been HP Anywhere, a platform that provides a way to write a mobile application that can run across both Apple iOS and Google Android devices. Based on the Apache Cordova framework, HP Anywhere uses open Web technologies such as HTML5 and JavaScript, as well as application containers designed to work with specific system calls found in iOS and Android.
The update to HP Anywhere, version 10.01, adds in additional security tools to the containers and offers a new API (application programming interface) that third-party mobile device management software can use to gather more performance information about the application.
