Last December, Kurt Marko and InformationWeek presented an interesting analysis on the current state of mobile development in the enterprise titled, “Building a Mobile Business Mindset.” When it comes to enterprise software, it’s clear from the data that mobile apps are the focus of the current software industry, and the trend has reshaped the old software development paradigms. Appcelerator co-founder, Nolan Wright, is quoted saying, “All development will be mobile development. It will just be software development.” That is the direction that he and his company are following, since they specialize in mobile cross-platform development tools, and they are not wrong in doing so.

Surprisingly, much of the survey data is contradictory; but this may be less about the qualifications of those who were surveyed and more about the industry’s uncertainty concerning mobile development. (Note: The article did not specify the qualifications of the surveyed individuals, only that they are technology business professionals.) The majority surveyed said that they are most concerned with cross-compatibility in their development tools, but they prefer to develop for native platforms. More businesses say that they plan to develop native mobile apps, although the majority of businesses have more web apps that they would like to be compatible on mobile. Features and functionality may be the purpose of enterprise apps, but the major concerns of mobile development seem to be user experience and the user interface.

Software development practices have been shaken by the mobile technology trend. Software has begun flooding back to in-house programming groups as agile development cycles and keeping apps relevant have become harder to outsource. Ease-of-use is king, and UX and GUI tools such as drag-and-drop have become more important to developers than debugging and database integration tools, although these tools are still necessary. Software engineers and their tools are evolving into Swiss Army knives that are able to tackle many devices and platforms as quickly as possible. More than ever, our new mobile world is requiring companies to choose developers with large skillsets and flexible development tools to build and maintain their software—a mobile mindset is a business necessity!