Apps World Europe Recap: Thinking Enterprise Apps? Think BlackBerry

The following post was contributed by David Arnold, Manager, Enterprise Solutions EMEA at BlackBerry

Recently, the EMEA Enterprise Solutions team decamped to London to participate in Apps World Europe (https://www.apps-world.net/europe/), one of the biggest mobile development conferences in the calendar this side of the Atlantic.

The BlackBerry Enterprise Development Stand, right next to the Enterprise World Theater.

The conference was packed with all manner of mobile businesses – development agencies, testing companies, SDKs and application platforms to make your apps better, monetization, device management solutions, and mobile security consultancies. This gave us a great opportunity to engage with our peers, dispel some of the myths about our business and demonstrate the new BES12 platform with its capability to drive Enterprise Mobility independent of mobile platform choice.

Throughout the conference, our stand was situated right next to the Enterprise World Theater and drew a steady stream of delegates who were both intrigued to get a glimpse and hands on time with our recently released BlackBerry Passport. They also get a sneak peak of our new BES12 Enterprise Mobility solution that was managing the iOS, Android, and BlackBerry 10 devices on display.

Sharif Penniman discussing mobile application security with Andy Boura from Thomson Reuters

Developing Enterprise Grade mobile applications should not be a challenge, and should certainly not present more significant development effort and expertise that we might expect from a consumer targeted project, however there are some gotchas. The first barrier that developers hit in the Enterprise is almost always the “Security Team” whose primary concern is to protect the corporate data on device and restrict any external access to its original source. To this end, Sharif Penniman, Enterprise Solutions Manager S. Europe, joined a panel to discuss the security challenges in mobile and how containerization and encryption of data at rest and secure connectivity provided by both BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry Secure Work Space for Android and iOS when managed by BES12 can solve the challenge.

David Arnold talks about “avoiding the integration challenge” to delegates at the Enterprise World Arena

David Arnold, Senior Manager Enterprise Solutions EMEA & APAC, went on to present a session focusing on how developers should approach the world of Enterprise. The key message from David’s session was to approach development cross-platform as Enterprises no longer have homogeneous estates of devices but a mix of platforms on which a solution must be delivered. It is important to embrace mobile application management platforms such as BES12 in development as these can dramatically decrease the pain of deployment and upgrade – especially in an agile development methodology, and where these solutions can also provide protection of corporate data on the end point and a secure, trusted connection behind the firewall developers can focus on what really matters to the users knowing that security have already checked the box.

Thanks go out from us to the team at Apps World, and to all of those who dropped by our stand to catch up and talk about Enterprise Mobility.