Firms should encourage their employees to write apps that they think will benefit the company and upload them onto the corporate app store, according to VMware's EMEA chief technologist, Joe Baguley.
Baguley, who was speaking at a panel discussion at VMware forum 2013, said that users are essentially writing their own apps at the moment, leading to firms being less productive as a result of having a plethora of information silos.
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"Employees are getting data sources from Salesforce and other things and putting them all onto an Excel spreadsheet - but that is then their own version of an app," he said.
"Users are writing their own apps, except they are Excel spreadsheets, so the question is how do we get them to actually write apps," he asked.
Baguley went on to say that in the future, employees should be able to put forward an application for the corporate app store that can pull in all of the data sources necessary for their role.
"It's going to happen as more people become tech savvy, and we give them easier tools to bring feeds together. [By allowing this] it's coming back to being CIOs and not chief infrastructure officers," he stated.
VMware's David Parry-Jones asked IT leaders: "Do you want to be a naysayer, and shut down SaaS, or do you think you have to accept them eventually and be able to provide and accommodate SaaS through a public domain?"
But Jaguar Land Rover's CTO, Gordon McMullan, believes that the pace of change in the mobile development market is too fast for its own employees to keep up.
"We recognise that mobility, the ability to create new functionality and new channels to reach our users and customers is vital, and from that perspective we are now looking to set up more mobile reference architecture across the stack. That's from device management distribution, app development and integration, enterprise application platform development and the governance that you need for the lifecycle of applications," he told Computing.
"However, the whole app development is something we see going completely out of house to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, and there is a number of reasons for that. It's a hugely developing marketplace at the moment and it would be hard to get the right type of developers involved and unlikely to be able to do so for a number of years. The devices and capabilities and toolsets are changing far too rapidly, and mobile development brings up a completely different skillset," he added.
