Driven by new business opportunities represented by the emergence of media tablets and the more than 5 billion mobile phones in use worldwide in 2010 (which will grow to more than 6.7 billion connections by 2015), interest in mobile business-to-consumer (B2C)-facing applications will continue to outpace that of mobile enterprise application adoption from 2011 to 2014, as well as application and Web development in general. There's no single dominant way to deliver mobile B2C applications and content, but there are several basic approaches enterprises are commonly using:

• Messaging, such as Short Message Service (SMS) or Multimedia Message Service (MMS), which is used primarily for outbound marketing campaigns, voting and query/response applications. In this research, we include the vendors that provide these services, which we have observed actively supporting at least one of the other methods, as the overall messaging technologies and markets become commoditized.

• The mobile Web, with a special emphasis on leveraging advances around the HTML5 standard to better reach across different devices/browsers and to provide improved browser experiences; when compared with native application approaches, it is best for informational and lighter weight, forms-oriented types of applications.

• Native/rich applications — written specifically for target environments or using a mix of Web and native programming — which provide, in most cases, the best overall user experience. This approach is required for apps provisioned from app stores and is best for interactive applications that require access to resources on the device (camera, location, compass, accelerometer, etc.).

• Cross-platform (compilation) tools that generate native or rich Internet application (RIA) code. Typically, these platforms employ tradeoffs in using the common functions across devices; hence, in most cases, the applications do not take advantage of the full capabilities of the targets or require the developer to use the native coding environment to "tweak" the application for native look and feel. These tool are often used to bridge applications among multiple platforms.

Many organizations use a mixture of the above categories for different mobile business purposes, often mixing platforms and architectures, as appropriate, to reach the audiences required. Gartner expects integration among the SMS, Web and native delivery systems to increase. Leading mobile consumer application vendors will offer ways to extend and integrate user experiences across these approaches. With this much variety in vendors, this Magic Quadrant represents a composite market. The first step in the vendor selection process needs to be picking a subset of the vendors presented herein by aligning business requirements and skill sets, with the second step being a look at relative strengths and weaknesses among a smaller set of candidates.

In this update, we have added analysis of vendors providing cross-platform tools, because interest in cross-platform approaches (such as cross-compilers and client-side runtime containers for applications) is increasing, as is interest in the impact and future direction of HTML5. It is noteworthy that mobile consumer application platform (MCAP) functionality is being added by increasing numbers of mobile enterprise application platform (MEAP) vendors. Although MEAP functionality is not an evaluation criteria in the Magic Quadrant, this reflects the effect of Web programming and consumerization on mobile application development, and points toward convergence of these markets.

This is a vibrant area, with seven vendors added and three dropped from a base of 16 vendors. All the vendors in this Magic Quadrant are experiencing substantial interest and growth in their platforms. However, most toolsets for mobile application development (AD) remain incomplete, and there are no Leaders in this Magic Quadrant, because the large ecosystem players, such as Google, Apple, Research In Motion (RIM), Nokia and Microsoft, are not positioning their AD and support platforms to support other OSs. The vendors with platforms focused on Web or cross-compilation are still relatively small — typically well under $50 million in annual revenue — and are likely acquisition or merger targets. Therefore, during the next two to three years, most organizations will need to adopt multiple mobile application delivery tools, usually from multiple vendors, to cover the range of platforms and delivery methods they seek.

We expect enterprises to select tools from multiple vendors on this Magic Quadrant (see Figure 1), depending on audience and application reach requirements. In our last iteration, we predicted that, by 2012, ongoing developments, mergers, partnerships and acquisitions would result in toolsets that cover all types of emerging mobile consumer application experiences. Some progress has been made in this area, but this has not yet occurred. Gartner also expects the requirements for leadership in this market to continue to track higher in 2012. Leaders need to offer multiplatform, markup-language-based or cross-compilation approaches, in addition to all three outputs (messaging, Web and rich/thick client). Several vendors have the potential to meet these criteria if they can scale their ecosystems or leverage technologies (especially HTML5 and advanced software testing techniques) to offer developers ways to offer value across the underlying technology boundaries.

Mobile AD for customers remains a hot topic for consumer-facing enterprises, regardless of the industry. Mobile AD has always been a trade-off between quality of experience and breadth of audience. The best quality of experience is provided by native applications limited to a single platform and, in the worst case, a single model of device, albeit at a high cost. The widest audience is achieved by technologies — such as SMS messaging — that are ubiquitous and low-cost, but provide poor-quality user experiences. This is one of the key drivers forcing organizations to adopt multiple mobile application paradigms. Some key metrics point to the requirements for a multichannel approach.

MCAPs refers to tools and services that deliver consumer-facing mobile applications. MCAPs covered in this report offer at least one of the three key delivery methods, and provide substantial tool and services to enterprises.

Mobile Messaging: Operating on virtually any device, mobile messaging is ubiquitous. Messaging is usually delivered as a service, where most of the revenue is made by network operators and messaging intermediary companies that route messages to operators on behalf of senders. Gartner predicts that, by 2013, there will be 5.2 trillion messages sent in the Asia/Pacific (APAC) region, North America and Western Europe, growing at a rate of 14.5% year over year. Gartner expects the overall SMS and MMS messaging market to be around $89.5 billion in the APAC region, North America and Western Europe. Some messaging companies provide additional services (e.g., related to mobile marketing) that are not addressed by this Magic Quadrant.

The Mobile Web: The mobile Web is available in some form on approximately 80% of mobile handsets (globally); however, it does not operate like the classic Web, where a single application of content source works on virtually any device. First, as of 1H11, only about 35% of handsets were smartphones, most of which include a full HTML browser. Many of the remainder use some form of cutdown browser that will struggle to render "standard" Web pages. Second, even when a device has a full browser, there are substantial variations among smartphones in such areas as screen size, input capabilities (touch, keypad, etc.) and aspect ratio, which makes viewing and interacting with content on these devices difficult, at best. Third, HTML5 is inherently complex and the specification and corresponding WebKit-based mobile browsers will require a higher level of investment in Web application testing. So, tool vendors must allow developers to adapt Web content to match a consumer's specific mobile device.

A key function of mobile Web tools is this dynamic adaptation of content. Many of the current Web transcoding tools can be purchased or be run as a hosted service. Gartner estimates that enterprises globally are spending approximately $250 million annually on such services. The demand by enterprises for mobile Web adaptation platforms will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 40% through 2014.

Native Applications: Native applications deliver the best possible mobile application experience. However, any application version that targets a single device platform (or OS version) involves a significantly smaller range of devices than the mobile Web or messaging. There are vendors for tools that create and test the applications, and markets for selling the completed applications — typically through application stores associated with key mobile platforms, such as Symbian, Apple, Android, RIM and Windows Mobile. Although this is a nascent market, compared with SMS/MMS and even browsing, the iTunes application store has experienced early success: At the time of this research, stores from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nokia and RIM have hundreds of thousands of applications each. Apple, with more than 350,000 distinct applications, has the most.

Cross-Platform Tools: Developers creating native applications have three choices — to write in a platform agnostic language, such as Java or Adobe Air, to commit to proprietary cross-compilers, or to code in third-generation languages (3GLs) or lower languages, as outlined previously. All of these options carry the implication that the supporting vendors and technologies will be ported or extended to handle future innovations in device OSs. In particular, the platform-neutral languages and cross-compilers carry a high risk-reward value proposition, and part of our analysis of such vendors includes whether they have the personnel and techniques to scale to address a highly dynamic set of targets.

During a period of three to five years, there will be a slow shift in this market from native to hybrid and Web approaches. This will occur as technologies such as the mobile Web mature, browsers become increasingly functional and capable of accessing device resources, and the toolsets provide richer features.

This Magic Quadrant is an update to "Magic Quadrant for Mobile Consumer Application Platforms." This Magic Quadrant addresses the needs of clients that pose inquiries, such as:

• Which vendors can help us create native and Web-based experiences on smartphones and tablets?

• Can you help us understand the platforms available for staging mobile Web-browser-based applications to consumers?

• What role will HTML5 play in the future of mobile AD?

• How can we expand beyond SMS or short-code marketing campaigns to richer mobile applications?

• Why shouldn't we just undertake separate development projects, each aimed at iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone or Symbian handsets?

• What are our choices for interactions with customers while mobile?

• Are cross-compilers that target mobile operating systems viable?

• Are there tools that will enable us to convert between mobile Web and native applications?

• Can MCAP vendors also support enterprise requirements (and vice versa)?

Such inquiries lead to a discussion of the relative strengths and weaknesses of mobile app developments with respect to portal and RIA development, mobile operating systems, the user experience, the size of the addressable consumer audience, the relationship of the mobile platform to e-commerce or Web investments, and the cost of conducting marketing, advertising, analytics, location-based services and customer care for such solutions. These trade-offs can be viewed as a set of tactical decisions; however, three types of subplatforms and their underlying components form the infrastructure for orchestrating mobile applications and experiences for consumers. This leads to a set of vendors from four technology areas:

• Mobile Web adaptation servers

• Messaging gateways

• Rich native mobile environments and their corresponding development tools/application markets

• Cross-compilers and tools

The vendors have widely differing strengths, weaknesses and visions for this market. Some are Web-centric, some focus on smartphone OSs, others are media-centric and some are messaging-centric. Users' experiences are evolving and overlapping from all of these perspectives. (For more on the underpinnings of the definition of this market, see Note 1.)

In this Magic Quadrant, Gartner expects enterprises to select more than one platform during the next three years. So readers should appreciate that:

• A team of analysts conducted a rigorous lengthy evaluation and peer review of nearly 70 vendors, 20 of which were deemed as qualifying for our criteria.

• This is a complex area. We appreciate that the Magic Quadrant may seem somewhat of an "apples and oranges" comparison; however, we have opted to include vendors supporting different MCAP paradigms, because they are effectively alternatives for many clients that may be considering, for example, a messaging or a Web solution for a mobile consumer application requirement, or a combination of the two (or three). In some cases, vendor offerings can be used in tandem to cover multiple requirements, such as in creating mobile Web apps and then creating native shells, so that they can be staged (and thus discovered) in app stores.

• This remains a nascent market. No vendors have complete platforms for all three types of mobile consumer application styles or all target platforms. At this point, leaders in the market are vendors that deliver a vision for what the market may become, but don't automatically have all the technology components an enterprise may require. The future of this market is multiplatform, and, to remain a leader, a vendor will have to address devices and OSs that are not its own. No single device, vendor or OS will have a dominant market share long term. A major part of the vendor selection task in this market is understanding and mapping the requirements to indicate the type of vendor required.

• When Gartner rates products in this Magic Quadrant, we combine several factors, including the quality of the tools, the range of interaction paradigms the tool supports and the range of platforms the tool supports. With all Magic Quadrants, leadership does not imply that a vendor or products is necessarily the "best" for all purposes, and being a niche player does not imply that a vendor is always an inappropriate choice. Gartner expects this market to change radically during the next five years, as leading tools support more platforms and more mobile application paradigms. The bar for leadership will rise significantly during the next one to three years.

• Many vendors have been given an "honorable mention," but have not been included in the Magic Quadrant, because they did not meet some or all the inclusion criteria. This does not mean they shouldn't be candidates for some mobile consumer application projects. Such vendors may be used to augment or extend implementations. In the case of some messaging vendors, they may provide adequate services in a specific region, even though they may not provide global support.

• There is increasing overlap between MEAP and MCAP vendors.

Although the distribution of the various OSs differs greatly, audience alone is not a simple factor that we used in a binary manner to rate the vendors. Instead, we divided the potential audience (or reach) by the requirements of the application and the task interaction required. Although messaging is clearly the medium with the largest potential audience, the fact that most transaction services and rich media experiences can't be supported makes it unsuitable for a growing number of desired applications. In the context of this research, we have considered the audience and the distribution of the technology platform, as well as its suitability for the desired application requirements.

Refer to Figure 2 in "Context-Aware Computing: The Importance of Mobile Consumer Application Platforms" as a guide to the criteria listed below. In that graphic, we depict links among the subplatforms, as well as the links among the supported mobile applications at runtime on the mobile devices. Gartner expects uptake in all three types of platform approaches to increase, and the ability to orchestrate the support of the applications across types will add value in supporting more-sophisticated mobile consumer user experiences. For inclusion, a vendor must meet all the common mandatory criteria listed below, as well as the mandatory criteria for at least one of the following:

• Messaging gateways

• Mobile Web adaptation servers

• Native mobile platforms

• Cross-platform

Common Mandatory Criteria

• Vendor must offer developer support (stand-alone or embedded in a broader tool suite), with 10 new reference customers using the platform in production environments for six to 12 months. Can be deployed as a service by a communication service or a cloud provider or behind the corporate firewall.

• Vendor must have annual revenue of at least $3 million. Must exhibit financial viability and have sufficient sales, pipeline and funding to ensure 12 months of operation. Vendors without significant installed bases (more than 100,000 active end users) must have strong partnerships.

• Vendor must have sufficient market momentum to drive Gartner client inquiries, and/or appearances on shortlists by enterprises considering mobile consumer application deployments.

• When rating vendors, Gartner especially considers four aspects of the platform: user experience, quality of toolset, range of user experience and range of mobile platform support.

Common Optional Criteria

• Analytics, dashboard capabilities, help desk connectors to popular network management, billing engines, call centers or other CRM products

• Interfaces to advertising engines, customer databases and content

• Advanced systems also contain business process engines, which are typically metadata-driven platforms that describe how the system will react to different use cases

• Shared development environments, across the differing output paradigms, enabling the enterprise to build the back-end connectors and operational functions of the application, regardless of output intention, which makes supporting these applications easier

Mandatory for Message Gateways

• Message prerouters (which order the messages and determine screening and/or blocking), carrier look-up capability, subscription management (e.g., for opt-in services), a notification server (for handling retries, etc.) and a message router that takes care of routing to a specific wireless carrier

• Operations for messaging delivery directly to wireless carriers

• Standards-based and proprietary APIs for global message delivery

• Support for SMS/MMS

Optional for Message Gateways

• API support for MMS, SMTP or email-based services

• Support for premium SMS

• Hot-link delivery and tracking

Mandatory for Mobile Web Adaptation Servers

• Corporate products require relatively simple content adaptation, compared with that needed by operators and content providers. Requirements include the capability to perform simple content transcoding, such as resizing images to fit the device screen and to generate HTML, CHTML or XHTML-MP to match the capabilities of the client browser.

• Must support at least three variants of markup languages:

  • HTML5, (ratified portions)

  • XHTML,

  • WAP

  • HTML

  • XHTML-MP

  • CHTML

  • XML

• Must provide a toolkit that directly or indirectly enables the IT support staff to tag or modify mobile content and application results

• Must support a wide range of devices, including at least two of the following categories:

  • Smartphones

  • PDAs

  • Tablet PCs

  • Notebook PCs

  • Internet tablets

  • Netbooks

  • Enhanced phones (with browsers)

  • Basic phones (SMS, MMS)

• Must support at least three of the following OSs and the browsers included with device OSs or their derivatives:

  • Microsoft Windows (Windows mobile)

  • Palm

  • RIM

  • Symbian (which includes Nokia Series 60 or Maemo support)

  • iPhone (OSX) Android

  • Linux

  • Java

• The device characteristic library drives content and application adaptation. The product must include a sufficient library of device characteristics to support more than 80% of the devices in a target geographic market. Enhanced capability includes those that use context to further format the presentation, such as Adobe's capability to render how applications appear in different lighting conditions.

• The product must automatically determine the nature of the attached device to drive the necessary content and application adaptation. An optional, but highly desirable, feature is the capability to sense the network performance to adapt content to network characteristics.

Optional for Mobile Web Adaptation Servers

• Software as a service (SaaS) — not including product or SaaS delivery models

• Streaming content — adaptation/capability detection

• A native search capability or integration with a corporate search capability, such as a Google search appliance

• Application provisioning and adaptation

• Network capability sensing — for example, transmitting smaller/low-quality images to a device connected by a slow, 2.5-generation network and faster, high-quality images to the same device when connected by a third-generation or fourth-generation network

• User name and password administration — should support independent user administration and password protection or capability to attach to an existing Web-based user name administration and authentication server

• Support Web-based authentication — may support end-to-end security across servers, as well as the encryption of data not on devices and across networks

• May support a variety of security standards, including IPsec, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS), as well as proprietary 128-bit encryption

Mandatory for Native Mobile Platforms and Cross-Compilers

• Development environment include plug-in to integrated development environments (IDEs), such as Eclipse, Visual C and Visual Studio, or by providing a proprietary IDE, either standards based (CSS, HTML or JavaScript) or a fourth-generation language that can port the applications to popular, smart-client OSs.

• Native mobile application platforms consist of a set of APIs, which may include hosting a provisioning mechanism and a streaming content database. These platforms rely on the native OS or a specific runtime or voice/instant messaging client as plug-ins.

• All significant mobile smartphone vendors, by virtue of providing an open OS capable of running third-party applications, are, by definition, eligible for consideration. To the degree they bring along developer and business ecosystems, support for those developers and a software development kit (SDK), they are included.

Optional for Native Mobile Platforms and Cross-Compilers

• Testing capabilities should include emulator and application logic testing.

• Application store interfaces should support automated application submittal and status reporting to the popular application stores (Apple, RIM and Android).

Mandatory for Cross-Platform Environments

The development environment should provide plug-in to IDEs, such as Eclipse, Visual C and Visual Studio, or provide a proprietary IDE that can port the applications to popular, smart-client OSs.

Optional for Cross-Platform Environments

Application store interfaces should support automated application submittal and status reporting to the popular application stores (Apple, RIM and Android).

Exclusion Criteria

MCAPs are a composite market, and the vendors listed in this section often need to be considered alongside those in the Magic Quadrant if they offer tactical advantages. Vendors excluded include those that:

• Have products that do not include enterprise-facing components or services (e.g., solely carrier-oriented gateways or information management system/service delivery platforms)

• Have platforms that only focus on video or audio and streaming content. These are excluded because this focuses on how to stage applications, as opposed to enabling enterprises to target consumers across thin, thick, hybrid or messaging architectures

• Provide components that supply only the functional aspects of a platform (device management, AD studio, application store interfaces, SMS aggregation or storefront) and that Gartner has not observed providing access to enterprises for end-to-end delivery platforms for mobile messaging

• Are wireless or wired carriers

• Serve carriers, game developers or media content owners exclusively

• Are regional SMS gateways or aggregators exclusively

• Are application publishers or developers, that happen to use toolsets of their own design

Many organizations are also deploying thin-client mobile applications for horizontal business-to-employee applications. Some of these platforms will also evolve into MCAPs during the next three to five years, as vendors are enticed by the comparatively large size of the consumer markets.

Honorable Mentions

Ansca: This vendor provides the Coronado platform, which is based on Lua, a higher-performance scripting language. Gartner sees the Coronado platform being used for rich mobile content, such as games and eBooks.

Appmobi: This vendor provides a cross-platform tool.

Clickatell: Located in Redwood Shores, California, this bulk SMS vendor has been in business since 2000, primarily providing packaged SMS services and extensive enterprise-facing APIs.

Handmark: Primarily a publisher/developer of mobile applications, rather than a toolset or platform for enterprises to use in-house, Handmark has been in the market since 1999. It has serviced a number of OEMs, carriers, and media and entertainment companies with the development, testing and deployment of applications across BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm, RIM and Apple.

iLoop: Located in San Jose California, iLoop's focus is on mobile marketing. It has a broad set of MMS/SMS and thin-client development capabilities, coupled with a burgeoning iPhone development practice. Content management and storefront options round out the product, giving iLoop a relatively complete offering for the development and deployment of mobile marketing content and applications. Appropriate for enterprises looking to outsource end-to-end development deployment, as well as the management of advertising content and applications.

InfoGin: This vendor offers mobile Web adaptation and transcoding to carriers.

July Systems: This India-based firm offers a cloud-based MCAP. Its focus has been in the media and sports industries. It provides a set of tools and dashboards for mobile application life cycle management.

Moofwd: This vendor provides a mobile cross-platform tool with significant enterprise-to-consumer focus; however, it primarily uses its own platform to deploy the applications it builds.

Motricity: Formed in 2004 with the integration of PoweredByHand and Pinpoint networks, Motricity has long been a fixture in the carrier storefront marketplace, providing storefront and content preparation, SMS/MMS AD, distribution and transaction/payment services for carriers such as AT&T. Its enterprise products have primarily focused on content-owning enterprises and limited thin-client transformation capabilities, with much of its managed Web solution built on Infogin technology. With increasing amounts of content and application purchases moving to OS vendor-owned and operated stores, we expect Motricity to refocus its efforts on growing its fledgling enterprise business.

Movidilo: A small company created in 2005, and based in Madrid, Spain. Movidilo was formed from the Parent Group of Ydillio, a managed voice services company. Primarily addressing enterprises with self-service and mobile marketing requirements, Movidillo has a unique method of application support, using widgets to develop and then deploy via its owned platform.

MoSync: This vendor provides a cross-platform tool.

mPortal: This vendor provides a Web-oriented tool.

MX Telecom: This vendor has an SMS focus, with an extensive set of enterprise APIs.

Netsize: This vendor has an SMS/MMS focus, with an extensive set of enterprise APIs.

Pyxis Mobile: Gartner has observed customer interest in the Pyxis platform as a base for consumer-oriented applications. Pyxis has pursued some high-profile consumer application opportunities by scaling its platform and altering the charging/cost models. Pyxis is an example of an MEAP vendor that is evolving into a general-purpose, cross-platform tool provider. Pyxis' pricing model is different from most of its competitors — it charges an annual fee with no additional per-user or per-usage fees.

Roundarch: This vendor is a professional services firm that leverages an internally built platform for mobile websites and apps.

Syclo: This is another MEAP vendor with a limited set of business-to-business-to-consumer instances, built through system integration partners.

Syniverse Technologies: This vendor has considerable presence as a messaging gateway (MMS/SMS) vendor. Its core offering competes directly with mBlox, Sybase 365 and Air2Web; however, Gartner has not observed significant enterprise inquiries concerning Syniverse as an MCAP, so it has not been included in the Magic Quadrant.

Tynec: This vendor is an SMS gateway provider, aimed at higher levels of delivery performance.

Worklight: This vendor provides a versatile platform that can be used to support consumer- and employee facing applications.

Other Excluded Vendor Types

Wireless Carriers: Typically provide platforms and interfaces, in many cases using the platforms provided by vendors in this Magic Quadrant or listed in this exclusion section. For their overall ratings, refer to Magic Quadrants for wireless carriers.

SMS Gateways/Aggregators: Echovox, Cylnk, Open Market, Singlepoint, UPOC Networks, CellTrust, BulkSMS, SMS2Email, SMSCarrier, SMSRelay and CellTrust

Other Mobile/PlatformSpecialists and Offerings: Red Foundry, Vibes, CiUI, Comverse, Crisp Wireless, Diverse Net, Leap Mobile, Mobile Distillery, Mobui, Motherapp, Nellymoser, Openwave, SurfKitchen, Third Screen Media, UI Evolution, Clairmail, MobileAware, Digby, Blackboard and Webapp.net.

Andanza, Appcelerator, Antenna Software, Kony Solutions, Nitobi Software, Sencha, Service2Media

Qualcomm (lack of market activity), InfoGin (refocused on carriers), Volantis (acquired by Antenna)

Product/Service

Do the vendor's mobile server software, messaging platforms, client software, AD toolkits, application management capabilities, scalability, device security and management abilities meet the buying requirements of enterprise users? Are the products and services provided by the vendor compelling from all viewpoints — end users, service providers, content providers and independent software vendors (ISVs)?

Overall Viability

To qualify, small vendors must be visible to Gartner within its client base. They also should be profitable or nearly profitable and/or have cash on hand to finance one year of operation. For large vendors, continued commitment from upper management for MCAP capabilities, and Gartner's estimation of overall company financials, is considered, as well as the number of appearances in inquiries and on Gartner customers' shortlists.

Sales Execution/Pricing

Factors include numbers and geographic dispersion of inside/outside sales, partnering and the level of local sales support for resolving issues. Also important are value-added reseller (VAR) and system integrator (SI) relationships, carrier partnerships and ongoing application developer relations. Vertical strategies and customers play a role in the criteria, as do pricing models and total cost of ownership (TCO).

Market Responsiveness and Track Record

How long has the company been in the MCAP market (messaging, mobile Web and on-device), and, in particular, how has it innovated around its core mobile capability, as well as along other facets of mobility, particularly mobile commerce? How has the company responded to the maturation of the market and its changing requirements? Is the company growing at or faster than the market rate?

Marketing Execution

Has the company successfully marketed its mobile tools or capabilities to specific vertical industries, locations or end users in IT? What is its strategy based on? Is it tooling, database, device, applications or SI channels? What is the level of market awareness of the company's mobile enterprise offering? How does the company work with its partners to create a healthy "ecosystem"?

Customer Experience

How do customers and partners view this vendor? Consideration from initial contact through sales, procurement, development, integration, deployment and support.

Operations

Has the company successfully scaled its business geographically? How well does the vendor interface with communication service providers and content providers? How well-run are the sales, marketing, finance, research, development, testing, system integration, help desk and other key functions? Are proper quality assurance (QA) processes in place? (See Table 1.)

Market Understanding

Numbers and geographic dispersion of inside/outside sales, partnering and level of local sales support for resolving issues are important. A longer-term vision of MCAP's functionality, particularly in cross-platform tools, and what next-generation mobile experiences will be.

Marketing Strategy

This entails a market understanding, demonstrated not only to Gartner, but showing evidence of impact on IT buying centers and application developers, of the requirements for security, management and integration with platforms, and of department/functional groups with requirements for rapid ROI and frontline applications.

Sales Strategy

This includes the number of sales professionals and their geographic spread, the number of vertically focused teams and the vertical markets with which they are associated. Within this category, we also evaluate the sophistication of the sales teams and the scalability of the sales model. This category seeks to take account of partner strategies, and how they will relate to future sales efforts.

Product Strategy

Does the future road map for the product reflect the market's direction and the likely requirements of buyers in 18 to 24 months? Does the history of the product reflect steady improvements and growth in functionality? Has the company built or acquired the pieces necessary to maintain product relevance/leadership? Does the company seek to address additional client requirements, beyond mobile application deployments?

Business Model

This category evaluates the vendor on its ability to balance the need for company and product agility with the need for leadership in the market. How does the vendor's focus reflect future market conditions and requirements? How will hosting, partnerships and services affect growth? Does the company's business model dissuade it from multichannel support?

Vertical Market Strategy

Does the vendor add extra value through focused, packaged mobile applications in growth vertical industries, such as transportation, logistics, healthcare, government, education, oil and gas, petrochemicals, utilities, insurance, financial services and professional services? Is it able to articulate a strategy for vertical differentiation, and can it maintain that position? Has it identified horizontal applications that span multiple vertical industries, and can it capitalize on those frontline applications across the customer base?

Innovation

Does the company have a compelling technical story that supports a compelling business proposition? Is the company a trend setter in mobile applications or is it a follower? Does it have an ambitious technical direction that will enable it to deliver ongoing product enhancements faster than its competitors? Does it provide input for or participate in standards bodies? We also consider intellectual property positions; however, Gartner does not provide legal advice.

Geographic Strategy

Does the company have a strong plan for supporting customers and growing business worldwide? Is the company strong in marketing and sales activities in at least two regions? What is its track record for multilingual support, including product, sales and partners? What are its international expansion plans, and do they mirror the regional market maturity rates we expect? (See Table 2.)

This nascent market will see tremendous growth during the next five years. Leaders must demonstrate clear superiority in providing convenient or compelling mobile consumer user experiences on a broad scale — at least nationally and, preferably, worldwide. Given the dynamic nature of this market, the bar for leadership rose significantly in the past 18 months and will continue to be raised. Gartner anticipates that Leaders will be required to support multiple smartphone, tablet, browser and application runtime containers.

Challengers in this category are providing mobile capability to consumers on a global scale, with strong operations capabilities that include solid analytics and billing, but are limited in their influence on the overall market or with enterprise IT organizations.

Visionaries have novel ways of approaching mobile platform diversity, they provide outstanding consumer experiences or they have broad platforms; however, they have not proved that their products and services can scale to provide a dominant platform regionally or worldwide.

Niche Players show promise, but exhibit significant gaps or weaknesses in one or more of these criteria: company or business unit size or resources, geography, product or platform breadth or originality, completeness of offering, focus or size of customer base/reach to consumers.

Founded in 1982, and headquartered in San Jose, California, Adobe is a large, global, cross-platform software development tool company. Adobe has increased the level of support for cross-platform tools with its Creative Suite 5.5, which includes support for HTML5 and hybrid AD targeting mobile devices. Awareness of Adobe in general is high in the Gartner client base and among content/Web developers, and Adobe's technology for content creation and Web-based consumption is well-respected in the industry. Gartner sees moderate interest in Adobe's mobile capability, hampered in part by the lack of support for Flash Player by Apple within mobile Safari. (Flash-based applications are supported on iOS.)

Appropriate Use: Media-rich enterprises, with requirements for mobile clients

Rating: Visionary

• Strong cross-platform capability bridging desktop with mobile device design studio. Available for Microsoft, Linux and Mac OS platforms.

• Solid installed base for Flash Player and AIR Lite on the desktop, Adobe has also made progress on rolling out Flash Player 10 across Android and Playbook and AIR across Android, Playbook and iOS, and it has enhanced its tool suite's ability to generate HTML5, Flash-based or hybrid applications.

• Huge potential audience of creative developers, with mobile output available from all the creative products (Illustrator, Shockwave, Photoshop, etc.), all of which are the default applications for creative content development.

• Acquisition and integration of Omniture gives Adobe an analytics platform capable of supporting context-aware services.

• Creative Suite 5.5 is relatively new release, and the loss of significant smartphone market share in the past year by Microsoft and Nokia has been offset by the success of Android. Google, Android OEMs and RIM are now the leading partners in supporting Flash on smartphones.

• The lack of support for Adobe Flash Player on iPad and iPhone browsers is forcing many organizations and developers to rethink how they build their mobile websites. While building deeper experiences with AIR application support for other platforms, such as Android-based products, varies, not all services are available on all platforms.

Founded in 1999 in Atlanta, Georgia, Air2Web has changed its corporate direction several times during its existence, from enterprise-focused application vendor to its current emphasis on consumer applications. It boasts a growing number of users that cover a wide span of verticals and use SMS as the primary method for customer communications. Air2Web is a SaaS-based vendor that offers its platform as a service (PaaS) for a monthly fee and charges additional fees for messaging or additional user overages.

Appropriate Use: Enterprises with strong text messaging needs that prefer SaaS and outsourcing mobile Web and native mobile development

Rating: Niche Player

• Air2Web owns a messaging infrastructure of significant size and scope (nearly 200 countries) that it can handle large volumes of interactive SMS-based campaigns or voting.

• Most of Air2Web customers are in the services business; thus, they need to reach a wide number of devices and have the corresponding requirement for SMS-based service applications. In addition, some email vendors are using Air2Web's platform.

• Clients have cited aggressive pricing as reason for selecting Air2Web.

• Not a good fit for enterprises that want to have a hand in mobile development. Air2Web is supporting enterprises with requirements for mobile Web and native applications through its own professional services offering.

• Customer references for Air2Web have been mixed, with some clients reporting an inability to deliver on non-SMS based requirements.

Headquartered in Madrid, Spain, Andanza Technologies was formed in 1997, and has traditionally been focused on the carrier and services verticals. It is now expanding into other verticals. It is strongest in Spain, but it has a number of international customers. Its current offering is based primarily on Web content transformation; and it relies on Web services-enabled back ends, because its database and application connecters are incomplete or not available for many platforms. Although much of Andanza's product road map remains focused on those service providers and the enablement of addition services attached to those service providers, it has recently expanded into other vertical industries, such as banking, oil and gas and transportation.

Appropriate Use: Enterprises with requirements for customer-services-based applications in the supported vertical industries and geographies

Rating: Niche Player

• Andanza's Esmero platform enables rapid assimilation of Web content into multiple mobile presentation formats, including mobile Web, text and rich-client applications.

• Limited messaging interfaces with a number of carriers worldwide combine with Web, and email-based messaging within a single platform.

• The vendor has strong analytics and reporting capabilities.

• This is a smaller company with a limited geographic reach (Spain and Spanish-speaking Latin America); however, these areas large potential markets for consumer applications.

• Its current offering is based on Web content transformation, primarily database and application connecters, which are incomplete or are unavailable for most platforms.

• Rich- and thick-client development and runtime are not on its current road map.

• The company has limited reach, because Andanza supports its own platform as its primary SI.

Headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey, with offices across North America, Europe and Asia, Antenna Software is covered in the Magic Quadrant based on its native cross-platform support and by virtue of its acquisition of Volantis, a mobile Web platform vendor with substantial global installed customer base. Antenna has the components and road map to become a leader in this market, but must balance the challenge of growing, while servicing global customers for employee-facing and consumer-facing applications.

Appropriate Use: Enterprises with broad mobile consumer application requirements, including mobile Web adaptation, HTML5 and native app store requirements

Rating: Visionary

• Antenna has extensive cross-platform AD experience, including streaming content and subscription services.

• Antenna is one of the larger mobile specialists, and it also has strong capabilities for mobile enterprise AD.

• The company has strong partnerships with carriers and good customer reference scores across multiple global customers.

• Antenna will need to build on its track record of integrating acquisitions, because building out capabilities in all areas for MCAP and integrating Volantis will take time.

• Antenna has the advantage of having design centers in three continents; however, this means it will need to spend time aligning its six research and development centers.

Founded in 2007, Appcelerator is located in Mountain View, California. The Appcelerator Titanium platform was one of the first of the newer generation of multi-OS development platforms, promising write-once capabilities across multiple device/OS types. Appcelerator's approach focuses on exposing the native capabilities of each device, features rapid development cycles, leverages an enterprise's existing Web skills, is extensible, and integrates with internal and external cloud services. it has achieved significant penetration among developers, with 1.5 million developers and 21 thousand applications deployed via the platform. Recent enhancements include integration with commerce, social, geoanalytics, user analytics and messaging capabilities.

Appropriate Use: Enterprises with requirements for multi-OS AD and Web-based skillsets

Rating: Visionary

• Appcelerator's development environment is a free download, and uses Web development skillsets to write mobile applications and mobile websites, keeping time-to-market, startup and trial/pilot costs low.

• The platform outputs native coded applications and websites, enabling full access to any available device feature, unique capability or modular extension by natively accessing more than 3,600 features through Appcelerator's SDK.

• Appcelerator offers modularized libraries of functions and commerce functions as application plug ins. PaaS, SaaS, and private cloud integration and modular extensibility to Appcelerator's platform is also possible.

• Appcelerator's IDE is Eclipse-based — built on technology acquired through its recent acquisition of Aptana.

• Appcelerator is one of the smaller vendors profiled in this research, so enterprises should ensure that it can meet all of their requirements for global coverage and support.

• Extensions to Titanium are developed in native languages for each OS, but exposed to Titanium developers through a JavaScript API.

Headquartered in Cupertino, California, Apple has, during the past four years, made a large impact on software development for mobile devices and on consumer application adoption. With the iPad, Apple redefined the tablet category, while simultaneously leveraging iOS and tools made popular to iPhone and iPod touch developers. With the SDK and enhancements to that kit, it has raised the bar for native development support. All of this combines to give developers a well-integrated set of APIs, compared with other device and OS vendors. Application developers have been active — there are now 350,000 apps in Apple's store.

Appropriate Use: The biggest hurdle for many developers is that development requires a Mac and also in learning Objective C. Apple provides no cross-platform tools, limiting developers to an audience of customers on iOS devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod touch) exclusively.

Rating: Challenger

• The iOS SDK remains the best in the industry for native device support, including best practices, development environment, emulator and extensive documentation. Apple's narrow focus enables it to go deeper, while cross-platform competitors and OS rivals that take broader approaches must deal with increased complexity.

• Apple's focus on the user interface (UI) continues to lead the market (although, for specific smartphone models, Android and Windows Phone 7 are closing the gap) in usage of its devices and end-to-end capability for loading apps and content onto the devices. This translates into a high adoption of applications among iOS users.

• Apple has been aggressive in the implementation of WebKit and HTML capabilities on the iOS devices. In the long term, this may enable more application transportability from iOS to non-iOS devices.

• Apple's control of OS, device and app store provides a consistent experience for the end user, and a consistent device profile for phone/touch devices and tablets.

• A huge audience of iOS devices, nearly 200 million to date (110 million iPhones, 60 million iPod touch and 16 million iPads) gives enterprises a ready-made, consistent audience of users and devices to publish to.

• Programming for native apps on iOS requires the skill of Objective C.

• Lack of support for Adobe Flash limits compatibility with legacy content investments.

• Apple continues to focus solely on its own iOS devices, and doesn't enable applications to build on other devices in the development kit; combined with the singular use of Objective C (not used by any other device vendor), this means that applications developed natively cannot be ported to any other OS.

• Apple remains relatively opaque when it comes to the testing process, app certification and future capabilities of the devices, although transparency in the application approval process has improved in the past few years.

• The development of iOS applications can only be done on Apple hardware Macs.

Founded in 1998 in Menlo Park, California, Google is one of the most active vendors profiled in this research. In addition to being the largest search engine provider in the world, the Android OS has made Google a major vendor in the mobile device and corresponding application market. It offers support for Java, as well as native Linux programming through Android NDK. Google has pursued an unique software licensing model that offers device manufacturers the Android OS for free. This has proved to be popular, with device vendors such as Motorola, Samsung, and HTC proffering a number of smartphones and tablets running Android.

For its SDK and developer tools, Google has followed many of the Web development standards it has supported for years, but retains much of the role it plays in the application and advertising functions of the OS opaque. This lack of transparency concerns some users and many enterprises.

Appropriate Use: Enterprises with native mobile client requirements, on Android devices exclusively

Rating: Challenger

• Android is the fastest-growing mobile OS in the world, with the largest number of device manufacturers supporting the platform, significant carrier breadth and widest selection of devices, including Smartphones and tablets for more than 14 manufacturers in a variety of sizes (from seven to 12 inches). In addition to Android, Google is also active in promoting Chrome, which holds the promise of being a cross-platform container.

• Standardized interfaces include JavaScript and CSS, as well as support for preratified HTML 5, giving Google a wide breadth of developers that can support the platform.

• Google continues to be the single largest vendor of Web-based advertising, supported by the search engine, mapping, mail and ancillary services (Google Talk, Google Earth, etc.). Most enterprises and end users will already have relationships with Google for these services.

• SDK and development tools, as well as developer support, are second only to Apple in terms of resource availability, widespread support and documentation.

• Fragmentation of the Android platform continues to plague Google and its developers. Without a single instance of the OS on more than 35% of its devices and a growing number of differing screen sizes, device capabilities and input methods supported, we see little Google can do to resolve this issue. Enterprises that develop Android applications are often forced to reduce capabilities to the lowest common denominator or alienate potential users.

• Additional fragmentation of the Android application stores requires enterprises to pursue relationships with a number of different marketplaces to reach the widest possible audience of users.

• Although quite robust for Android devices, Android development tools do not enable applications to be ported to other devices/OSs.

HP (Palo Alto, California) acquired Palm since the last Magic Quadrant and has made progress in signing up content partners for its platform. HP has also made progress on its developer website since the last update, and has placed its marketing emphasis on hardware upgrades (the Veer smartphone and the Touchpad tablet). HP is at high risk of having webOS rust on the shelf as it tries to become a software/Web vendor. HP's products do not present a major business opportunity to reach a large number of consumers in the near term. HP will strive to change this as it releases Version 3.0 of webOS across all its devices in 3Q11.

Appropriate Use: Enterprises looking to take advantage of webOS' capabilities for gestures/overall usability

Rating: Niche Player

• Excellence in webOS performance and user experience, including ease of use, such as not requiring tethering to other devices, as required by competitors.

• Significant financial backing, and management visibility and commitment by HP, including a more than 30% increase in 2011 in developer resources.

• Longstanding loyalty and innovation by Palm users and developers — customer references are enthusiastic about porting applications from iOS and Android to webOS.

• Limited market share and geographic coverage of devices/carriers for webOS with no release. HP has not been able to boost Palm's tiny (0.4% in 4Q10) smartphone market share. Bringing webOS to other form factors will require significant ongoing R&D and support effort.

• Gartner has not observed significant inquiries from application developers or enterprise IT buyers regarding webOS.

• HP still faces significant challenges in scaling the developer ecosystem for webOS. It has not made acquisitions or partnership that make it a significant MCAP player, and the investments it has made thus far in internal resources have yet to produce results.

Based in San Mateo, California, and founded in 2007, Kony Solutions is a platform vendor that is able to create native applications for a wide range of smartphone and tablet platforms, including Android, iPhone, Palm, RIM and Symbian. Applications can also be generated in more platform-neutral forms, such as Java ME, JavaScript and HTML5. Furthermore, unlike many competing multiplatform tools, Kony can create mobile Web applications, and has integrated with aggregators and carriers to send SMS messages. Kony offers one-stop mobile development sourcing, providing AD, a software platform and deployment assistance. Licensing from Kony is based on a target by target price for each generated application.

Appropriate Use: Enterprises with heavy requirements for applications that span mobile Web, multiple OSs and form factors (tablet, desktop, and smartphone), but lack resources for in-house development

Rating: Visionary

• Kony's development environment enables applications to be built for all the popular smartphone and feature phone OSs, as well as for the browsers those platforms support. This gives Kony one of the widest addressable audiences for its applications among vendors profiled in this research.

• Kony takes an aggressive stance toward cross-platform support through either a virtual machine or native, human-readable code generation. Kony provides a superset of APIs across all major device OS vendors, as well as unique APIs for services or functions not supported across all platforms. In addition, customers can use native or third-party libraries, as well as Kony's APIs.

• Kony's focus on a few specific vertical industries (e.g., banking and travel) has won it a loyal base of users in those verticals and a deep understanding of the requirements for customer-facing applications for those enterprises.

• Kony is growing rapidly, which sometimes makes it difficult to maintain quality, and leverage lessons learned and techniques back into its main product. Although Kony is a versatile tool, it is complex due to fragmentation and nature of the targeted operating systems and browsers.

• Kony's licensing model tends to be expensive, especially for modest application requirements.

• Many of Kony applications are developed offshore, the bulk by Kony developers in Hyderabad, so there are few developers with deep Kony platform skills available in the marketplace or from ISVs —VARs, SIs or agencies. Few references have taken the platform in-house to produce or modify applications.

• Kony is a proprietary tool, although the option to generate applications in more-open-technologies, such as JavaScript and HTML5, and the fact that the tool generates human-readable code, allaying some concerns about lock-in.

Located in Sunnyvale, California, mBlox had nine additional offices globally. Founded in 1999, it remains privately funded. mBlox operates one of the largest SMS networks in the world, reaching more than 180 countries with direct SMS connectivity. It has run marketing and transaction-based applications over SMS for clients in nearly every conceivable vertical industry, although much of its client base in located in Western Europe and North America. mBlox has recently begun to explore how to deliver other methods of interaction, particularly with smartphones. They can be supported over its network, although we have seen little traction among our clients for these additional solutions.

Appropriate Use: Enterprises with global requirements for messaging-based applications supporting marketing or transaction-based services

Rating: Niche Player

• The pervasiveness of the SMS/MMS offering and strong execution references. mBlox maintains dedicated SMS centers (SMSCs), which provide end-to-end control over message delivery and direct SS7 connections. This enables users to send and receive messages locally and internationally with carrier-grade reliability.

• mBlox has direct connections with 274 carriers worldwide and indirect reciprocal arraignments with more than 400 others, giving it a global reach that is equaled by few of the companies described in this research.

• mBlox continues to provide solutions with Active Server Pages (ASP) clients for a wide range of applications, including couponing, advertising/marketing, service delivery, voting and banking, and mobile ticketing with all the aforementioned applications being SMS-based.

• mBlox continues to lack a Web-based or an HTML-based development/deployment option. This limits its applicability for many applications and enterprises.

• Customer references are mixed for mBlox users, with some customers experiencing widely variable levels of service.

• mBlox has only recently articulated a credible rich-client strategy, which has only just begun to receive market traction.

During the past 18 months, Microsoft has embarked on an ambitious path, first launching Windows Phone 7, then announcing its partnership with Nokia to make Windows Phone 7 the flagship OS for Nokia. The Windows Phone 7 SDK includes Silverlight for Windows Phone 7, a Windows Phone Emulator, Express Blend 4 for Windows Phone and Visual Studio2010, all in one bundle.

Appropriate Use: Enterprises that anticipate they will leverage Bing and the emerging partnership with Nokia

Rating: Niche Player

• Microsoft's flagship IDE, focused solely on Windows Phone 7, is robust and can be used to design high-quality user experiences.

• The licensing of Windows Phone 7 by Nokia will give Microsoft access to large global markets.

• Microsoft's Bing search platform is now one of its strengths, giving it a platform for targeted context-aware marketing capabilities to support large-scale mobile consumer content adaptation and targeting.

• The large application developer community for its core toolsets. Silverlight portal offering is widely adopted and is one of three approaches (along with Adobe Flash and Ajax/POX) cited by Gartner clients that are mainstream Web developers as mobile Web cross-platform options.

• The Windows Phone 7 global market share is less than 10%. Microsoft does not offer a large target market with its MCAP offering, because Microsoft has lost significant market share in mobile phone OS, and it lost further application share when it made the decision that Windows Phone 7 would not be compatible with Windows Mobile 6.5. Microsoft's market share has not rebounded in the past year, and it will take it through at least 2012 to recover market momentum.

• Microsoft continues to lack in vision and execution for support of non-Microsoft smartphone platforms or adaptations.

• Microsoft stills lags on mobile browser development. Microsoft has announced HTML5 support in the next generation of Windows phone devices, but these will not ship until late 2011.

• Microsoft's track record in mobile in the recent past is fraught with changes in direction — e.g., the cancellation of the Kin phone, the decision to discontinue support for Windows Mobile 6.5 without any sort of conversion or upgrade migration path to Windows Phone 7. The decision to focus Windows Phone 7 on Silverlight lessens the amount of leverage from previous investments in Microsoft's ASP.NET framework, combined with SharePoint, which some enterprises have used a starting point from which to build mobile Web adaptation servers.

Founded in 2000, and headquartered in Kaiserlautern, Germany, Netbiscuits has expanded its mobile Web adaptation capability to support push-based couponing through texting, and hybrid apps using HTML5. Netbiscuits provides special "Biscuits" (similar to widgets) for all common content and functional elements of a website, including such areas as location, banners/ad networks and analytics. Each Biscuit has a special number of degradation levels, which ensure that the content of each individual Biscuit can be optimally adapted to virtually any end device. Netbiscuits provides a framework that groups end device categories into multiple levels, and then leverages the Biscuits for rendering and customization. The framework supports devices ranging from tablets to touch smartphones to feature phones.

Appropriate Use: Strongest support for iOS and Android, some strong Symbian references, particularly suited for enterprises that prefer mobile SaaS

Rating: Visionary

• Netbiscuits strong suit is in its vision, which is one of the most complete in the industry, including the addition of an ad studio. Netbiscuits' broad framework covers simple transcoding requirements, text-based content and hybrid applications.

• Flexibility in the choice of development tools, including NetBeans, Eclipse, Microsoft VS and others.

• Overall customer satisfaction on platform performance, customer care and documentation remains above the industry average.

• Netbiscuits has been somewhat slow in execution and remains one of the smaller vendors in the Magic Quadrant. It did receive substantial investment in 1Q11 for expansion — enterprises outside Europe need to be clear on support requirements and SLAs.

• Potential for lock-in to Netbiscuit's proprietary markup language — BiscuitML.

Formed in 2000, Nitobi Software first launched the PhoneGap tool that has become representative of the company in 2008. The PhoneGap development platform is an HTML and CSS-based platform that embeds standards-based application functionality in an OS-specific wrapper for access to device resources The cloud-based compiler offering is unique and offers the ability to rapidly add new feature sets and integrate native resource support, as quickly as the device vendors can release them. PhoneGap's standards-based approach has garnered a significant developer following, including many agencies and even other vendors profiled in this research.

Appropriate Use: Enterprises that have access to Web-based development resources and application requirements across multiple OSs/devices

Rating: Niche Player

• Open-source platform and widely distributed development environment has enabled Nitobi to achieve a remarkable number of developers and agencies that develop consumer-driven applications.

• Standards-based development, HTML, CSS and JavaScript, coupled with support for a number of native features on devices, enables a wider audience of developers than native coding.

• The pricing model for enterprises is based on number and yes of applications deployed, with no upfront investment in the development toolset required. This, in concert with the Web-standards-based development capabilities (Web developers are often less expensive the native coders), keeps costs lower for enterprises that want to try out the platform and its capabilities.

• Financial conditions (significant losses, of the same order of magnitude as top-line revenue); recent pullback in geographic coverage of devices/carriers.

• Small smartphone market share; many of its applications have been developed for feature phones and voice-centric devices. PhoneGap is one of a few products that is able to reach this segment of the market

• Nitobi is one of the smaller vendors profiled in this research; enterprises should fully investigate if PhoneGap can provide the required services and support.

During 2011, as it seeks to recover market share from Apple and Google in smartphones, Nokia has made dramatic shifts in its software strategy. By far its choice to partner with Microsoft for the OS for its smartphones is the most dramatic area, and it has shelved its plans to migrate developers from Symbian OS to Meego, positioning its Qt offering as a migration tool from Symbian to Windows Phone 7 instead. Nokia's strength is its market share for Symbian-based smartphones. Its future share market share will rely on its ability to support its brand within Microsoft's application store, and its ability to retain Qt as a tool in future platforms.

A traditional competitor to Nokia, Motorola (which did not qualify for this Magic Quadrant), struggles with being overshadowed by Google in its relationship in building smartphones for Android. Despite financial arrangements and the potential of launching best-in-class context-enriched services for developers through a combination of Microsoft's Bing offering combined with Nokia's Navteq location services capabilities, Nokia runs this same risk of being overshadowed by Microsoft. In the longer term, Nokia will lose the value attaching its brand to a unique user experience.

Appropriate Use: Developers that will find Nokia's platform offering the best fit include those in enterprises targeting countries where Symbian retains high market share, those that have large application investments and wish to port from Symbian to Windows Phone 7, and those that would like to be positioned to reach early users of the first Windows Phone 7-based Nokia products.

Rating: Niche Player

• Qt remains an innovative, open-source, cross-platform development framework, and Nokia has a track record of innovation in the areas of applications, location and navigation, as well as in supporting app stores and ecosystem support.

• Top-tier understanding of handset design, which is still the largest overall mobile phone market share, and its relationships with wireless service providers worldwide, which are the largest of any single vendor.

• Nokia still has large market share in most emerging markets, so there is life left in its previous investments in Symbian.

• Nokia’s Ovi Store is the world's most local application store, with 190 countries offering local content. This provides an opportunity for local developers to leverage Nokia’s installed base.

• Nokia offers unique monetization enablers, which will be integrated into the marketplace: this includes access to operator billing in 132 operators worldwide, which holds the potential for a substantial increase in mobile application sales once operator billing is activated.

• Its partnership with Microsoft is an admission that Nokia could not fix the inherent problems it had in its smartphone ecosystem, particularly in areas of innovation on user experience. Microsoft has its own toolsets, which may overshadow Qt when it comes to Windows Phone 7 development.

• The limited Symbian road map means that cutting-edge developers will only consider Windows Phone 7 devices, limiting the audience in key markets, such as the U.S., and narrowing the potential user base in other regions.

• No Nokia handsets with Windows Phone 7 will ship until 2H11 at the earliest. Nokia and Microsoft are still in early stages of setting up their partnership and blending their developer and content ecosystems.

• No significant support for tablets in Nokia's platform.

Founded in 1984 in Waterloo, Canada, RIM remains one of the largest smartphone vendors in the world, and its development tools are in widespread use. Once an enterprise-focused development platform, in recent years, RIM has revamped its device lineup and priced it aggressively. As a result, a substantial number of consumers are loyal to BlackBerry's strength as a texting experience, with more than 70% of new device sales to consumers. As a platform, RIM has more than a device relationship with those end users, as most use some form of RIM email (either BIS or BES). RIM is repositioning its developer value proposition to keep pace with Apple and Google touch-based UIs. Its main thrust is in merging the OS and tools supporting Canadian firm QNX and Swedish firm TAT to further enhance their touch-based interfaces. The Playbook is the first product of that collaboration, and can support the porting of Android applications.

Appropriate Use: RIM's SDK for QNX will be rapidly maturing during the next 12 months, and developers need to be aware that mapping the presentation APIs between Android and QNX-based apps will require RIM's Android Player. Java developers in enterprises with native mobile client requirements on BlackBerry or QNX devices will find RIM's tools the best fit.

Rating: Niche Player

• RIM has significant market share among smartphone users, in mature markets (such as North America and Western Europe), as well as in developing markets. It has an extremely loyal user base.

• BlackBerry messenger is a network of more than 40 million users, with strong social capabilities, but few details have been provided as to how a developer can access those resources.

• Strong operational capabilities through its network operation center, especially around push messaging, data efficiency, delivery and device performance.

• Details for the migration of all BlackBerry products from the current RIM OS to the newly purchased QNX OS are scarce, other than the statement that all RIM devices will eventually run QNX. Enterprises should demand, at a minimum, a road map for the development toolsets and ecosystem support.

• RIM's Application Store continues to lag behind Apple's and Google's in terms of available applications and enterprise inquiries regarding customer-facing applications, despite outnumbering both vendors in terms of deployed devices and market share.

• RIM's development tools address only RIM smartphones, and do not enable those applications to be ported to devices running other OSs, including its QNX-based Playbook. RIM plans to add Java and Android players to its QNX offerings in 3Q11.

In late 2005, Sybase purchased Mobile 365, forming Sybase 365. Then, in 2010, SAP purchased Sybase for $6.5 billion. SAP/Sybase 365 is a global messaging network with direct carrier relationships that enable it to reach billions of customer worldwide. Sybase, through its MEAP product set, the Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP), has significant AD and rich-client deployment capabilities; however, it has been slow to integrate them into the Sybase 365 platform, or provide a timeline for doing so. Sybase has focused on a few vertical industries, such as financial services, government agencies, and mobile operators, and provides transaction-based applications to those customers via the SMS platform.

Appropriate Use: Enterprises with global messaging and transaction-based application requirements

Rating: Challenger

• Large global reach, touching 140 mobile operators directly, and an additional 850 operators though its reciprocal agreements.

• Its mobile messaging offering is best-of-breed, with strong database/interface support, global reach, campaign management and prebuilt application modules.

• One of the largest vendors profiled in this report, with strong global service and support capabilities, and a large network of VARs and SIs.

• The SUP provides a development environment that can reach across multiple OSs and device types; however, enterprises considering Sybase for their customer-focused applications should investigate plans for the integration of these product sets.

• Sybase 365's SMS/MMS aggregation pricing is often higher than proposals from other vendors, issues with timeliness continue to be reported for some global deployments.

• Gartner has observed a lack of urgency in charting a course for the integration of the disparate product sets in the Sybase and SAP mobile ecosystems, and this state applies to the 365 product. Sybase 365's lack of Web-based development options will limit its exposure to mainstream application and Web developers.

Located in Redwood City, California, Sencha's approach to AD is a leading example of a Web-centric approach to mobile AD. In contrast to native code cross-compilers, such as Kony and Appcelerator, the Sencha Touch AD framework is based on HTML5. It includes its own implementations for geolocation and storage, and Sencha's EXT JS provides a cross-browser framework. Sencha is also analyzed in Gartner's "MarketScope for Ajax Technologies and RIA Platforms."

Appropriate Use: Sencha will be attractive to IT organizations and ISVs that have a great deal of Web application and JavaScript development expertise, and little native development expertise.

Rating: Visionary

• Sencha fits best with developers whose predominant mobile application needs are Web, as opposed to native (app store), as well as applications that need more complex integration with the OS.

• There is large amount of interest and activity around Sencha among enterprises (including retail brands) that prefer to control the user experience.

• Sencha's fortunes will be tied tightly to the adoption and maturation of HTML5, as many parts of the specification will take multiple years to ratify and then find their way into the technology stacks of browser and device manufacturers.

• For native apps, Sencha developers will either need to code native wrappers or use tools such as PhoneGap to build apps using Web and native technologies.

• Sencha's business model is a mix of license and service revenue, which is in stark contrast with many of its competitors. Sencha is one of the smallest vendors in terms of the number of employees on this Magic Quadrant and It is likely that some of those competitors will scale and create much greater revenue (and market presence) than Sencha.

This Netherlands-based company was founded in 2005 to focus on mobile application development for media and content-owning enterprises. Service2Media has had success with Western-European-based news and media outlets, and has expanded (and found success) among financial services, insurance and utilities enterprises. The platform supports a wide variety of devices and OSs, including iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows mobile, in addition to Web and desktop-based capabilities. Like many of the smaller vendors in this space, Service2Media positions itself as a "one-stop shop" that can design, build and deploy mobile application, all on the Service2Media platform, although few of its clients have taken the reins of the platform for their own development

Appropriate Use: Enterprises that have application requirements across multiple OSs/devices and are looking for an end-to-end user experience platform

Rating: Niche Player

• Service2Media's App Lifecycle Platform reaches smartphones, tablets and desktop applications across all of the popular OSs and browsers, one of the widest audiences of devices, users and potential customers. In addition, it has partnerships that enable it to add messaging to its application outputs.

• A significant number of clients, across multiple industries, delivering a number of different applications, customer- and service-facing, content- and distribution-focused, social media interactive and still others that have transaction capabilities (e.g., mobile banking).

• A graphically based, codeless development environment enables developers, once trained, to develop for all supported platforms.

• Single code base for applications, means that any changes to the application are reflected in the app that is deployed to all platforms with a single change.

• The smallest vendor profiled in this research — with limited, albeit growing, geographic reach — will bring challenges of expansion as Service2Media prepares to scale for more global deployments.

• The development environment, (based on Lua), is well-suited for Web developers with scripting experience. However, for enterprises that choose to outsource, Lua developers are less plentiful.

• The separation of runtime from application data, while it enables a single application code base, requires that access to new device resources (camera, accelerometer, compass, etc.) will first have to be integrated into that runtime before applications developed for the platform can take advantage of them.

An MEAP vendor with global operations and offices across the U.S., Europe, Latin America and the APAC region, Spring Wireless (Sao Paulo, Brazil) provides a metalanguage MCAP that supports native, Web, messaging and voice applications. Through acquisitions and internal development, Spring has produced a platform to provide mobile B2C solutions to financial services and consumer packaged goods (CPG) enterprises. Like its MEAP offering, it is sold in both hosted and behind-the-firewall formats. Many of the customers using Spring framework applications have codeveloped, using Spring Wireless Professional services.

Appropriate Use: Good match for enterprises that can leverage Spring's prebuilt mobile consumer apps for financial services, general marketing, entertainment, on-device portals, and account alerts and notifications

Rating: Niche Player

• Strong presence in South America, particularly in consumer packaged goods companies, but also has references in banking and with service providers.

• Wide range of channels supported, including SMS and over-the-air (OTA) provisioning, in addition to app store support.

• In terms of revenue and employees, Spring is one of the larger best-of-breed MCAP vendors; it can also provide enterprise AD and support and was evaluated in "Magic Quadrant for Mobile Consumer Application Platforms."

• Spring has a limited global customer base.

• Its tools are configuration/script-driven, rather than generating markup.

Usablenet offers mobile Web adaptation, rich native application support and assistive communications for the handicapped, as part of its portal toolset and server. In 2010, Usablenet launched a tool to support native AD as well. Enterprises with strong in-house Web expertise and mature e-commerce frameworks are a "sweet spot" for Usablenet, because they can delegate the mobile specialization entirely to Usablenet, removing the requirement for in-house mobile Web programming capabilities. One of Usablenet's core value propositions is that it provides all technological services necessary to translate a website into the mobile Web, without needing to involve the client beyond selecting the suitable content.

Appropriate Use: Best fit for enterprise requirements for outsourcing using a SaaS model

Rating: Visionary

• Gartner has observed significant adoption of Usablenet by large enterprises, including retailers, airlines and government, with more than 40% of its business now coming outside North America.

• Vision is solid, and relevance to portal and e-commerce strategy for firms is well-articulated.

• Relatively high TCO, including significant recurring costs — Gartner has observed high incremental costs in supporting multiple websites. Organizations can reduce this TCO by reducing the amount of streamlining of their e-commerce sites upfront.

• Customer references recommendations are highly variable, ranging from excellent in all areas, to customers complaining of poor application quality and lack of responsiveness.