Organizations continue investing in mobility to enhance productivity and collaboration for their workforces. Meanwhile, mobile application initiatives for the end customer base are rapidly growing, as a "must have" element for successful CRM, marketing and advertising initiatives. From among the wide landscape of players in the mobile space, we have selected four innovative vendors that may help adopters to pursue mobility objectives successfully: Gamma Engineers, Appcelerator, MoSync and Cortado. While Cortado enhances real-time collaboration by enabling desktop process functions on smartphones, the remaining three vendors address mobile business-to-consumer (B2C) application development, enabling "write once, deploy everywhere" approaches and introducing cloud services at different levels.

• To deploy mobile B2C applications for a wide audience of end customers, organizations must develop and manage applications across multiple platforms. Device platform fragmentation affects application viability, cost-effectiveness and user experience. Many vendors offer functions, tools and platforms to address these priorities; fewer pursue a "write once, deploy across multiple platforms" approach.
• App stores represent a major distribution channel for successful adoption of mobile applications.
• Open-source platforms are emerging in the mobile application development space, offering organizations a chance to benefit from community-based initiatives, while containing deployment costs.
• Virtualization of desktop functions enhances real-time collaboration, because people can more easily share information and complete tasks, access data, and function remotely.

• Explore opportunities to grow and transform the business through the adoption of mobile business-to-employee (B2E) collaboration and mobile B2C application development capabilities.
• Leverage application contextualization and personalization to provide enhanced experiences for your mobile employees and end customers.

This research does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Tampa, Florida (www.gammaengineers.com )

Analysis by Monica Basso

Why Cool: Gamma Engineers takes an innovative approach to mobile consumer application development with its people-centric approach, focusing on optimization and personalization of individual customer experiences through the use of personal context, preferences and social analytics. Its gSP product supports enhanced user interface constructs, such as avatars, augmented reality and the ability to request a call from the mobile application to a call center. It offers enabling rich capabilities, such as geolocation, geofencing and prepackaged, industry-specific applications, such as paperless boarding passes. In addition, a development environment is available to build thick-client applications and content integration with Web services, and to upload to different app stores. Gamma Engineers offers a rich set of packaged applications for specific verticals, such as airlines, retail banking, insurance and retailers. These capabilities can be provided as a platform product or as cloud services, and as platform-level or application-level services. Finally, Gamma Engineers provides complementary services to help organizations with business process analysis and change, and optimized customer experience design, as well as application development and customization services.

Challenges: Geolocation in gSP is limited to Cisco's and Alcatel-Lucent's infrastructure. Organizations not using these products cannot benefit from the entire set of gSP features; therefore, this technology limitation may represent an obstacle to wider adoption.

The small size of this company (about 20 people), despite sharing a common element with many new vendors in emerging areas like mobile B2C application development, may represent a serious obstacle to adoption by large organizations pursuing mobile CRM initiatives. The business-critical nature of these applications and relatively high investment required might suggest choosing mature suppliers.

Intense competition from almost 100 vendors in the mobile consumer application platform market and the mobile enterprise application platform market, particularly from vendors with a global market footprint, such as Sybase, might limit viability and adoption, particularly outside North America. Gamma Engineers' future may depend on it specializing in selected vertical sectors, or eventual acquisition by a larger player.

Who Should Care: Organizations with large customer bases aiming to improve customer services through the optimized integration of mobile applications, call centers, social media should consider Gamma Engineers.

Mountain View, California (www.appcelerator.com )

Analysis by Nick Jones

Why Cool: Mobile development has traditionally been challenging because it demands skills and tools that are specific to each platform. Therefore, it's both complex and expensive for an organization to create applications for multiple mobile platforms. Appcelerator's Titanium Mobile product addresses these challenges with a development toolset that is based on Web standards, such as JavaScript, so it leverages Internet productivity and development skills. This can save significant development time, compared to developing with Apple or Google's SDKs. Titanium Mobile focuses on enabling pure native application development by providing JavaScript extensions to access common mobile device features, such as GPS and camera, native-platform APIs, and external interfaces to Web services, such as social networking. Appcelerator has taken mobile development tools beyond programming, and provides cloud services to assist with application packaging, app store submission, testing and runtime analytics. Appcelerator's current business model is to charge a monthly subscription fee for support and cloud services, such as analytics that allow developers to understand who is using the application and what features they're accessing. In the future, Appcelerator also plans to support advertising-funded applications. The iPhone, iPad and Android platforms are supported in the current version, while BlackBerry support is planned for later in 2010. Titanium Mobile is distributed under an open-source license, which partly alleviates developers' concerns about dealing with a very small company. Appcelerators' business model is based on licensing-embedded analytics.

Challenges: Appcelerator is a very small company (with fewer than 20 staff members in 4Q09) that is competing in a exceedingly dynamic mobile development space in which many new tools and vendors have emerged in the past year. We estimate that there are over 50 potential competitors, including cross-platform products, such as Flash Player 10; application frameworks/libraries, such as PhoneGap; development tools, such as Kony; and a large number of simple cross-platform generators, such as Appbreeder and SwebApps, which produce more-restricted applications, but do so very rapidly. Appcelerator's main challenge is to build and maintain a loyal developer community in the face of this competition. Titanium Mobile's cross-platform support is limited to Apple and Android platforms, which will limit its appeal in regions outside the U.S., where Symbian dominates.

Who Should Care: Any organization developing applications for both Android and the iPhone/iPad should explore Appcelerator Titanium Mobile as a tactical alternative to native application development.

Stockholm, Sweden (www.mosync.com )

Analysis by Katja Ruud

Why Cool: MoSync has developed a C++ SDK tool called "MoSync," which facilitates porting and creating applications from one mobile platform to another. The driver is to remove barriers to the development and uptake of mobile applications caused by fragmentation. It is a Cool Vendor for at least two reasons:

From a market perspective, because the mobile applications environment and uptake is hampered by the endless stream of mobile devices and the growing number of operating systems with multiple versions. The process of porting applications to other platforms is costly, in terms of time and capital. Savings come from the elimination of the usual re-engineering of the application (effectively changing to a new input language), instead only having to readapt it to another platform.

From a developer perspective, because, without any knowledge of the mobile environment, such as platforms or devices, or of specific languages, application developers can still write applications for mobile use, and MoSync subscribers should be able to benefit from a collectively expanding development community. In most cases, developers want their applications just to be available (and also on older devices), which is positive, because, in 2010, new sales will represent only about one-third of all devices globally, and about 40% of devices in use are old. Clearly, this is also helping to derive more benefits from the investment made in existing code and to publish the applications to a wider range of platforms at a limited cost.

There are several other areas providing MoSync with momentum to grow. Gartner expects cross-platform mobile application development tools to become more common and more capable, and also to be accompanied by more platform-independent application development technologies. Also, MoSync is based on open source, and for users to be able to download the source code provides some level of comfort, compared with closed or proprietary offerings, which may imply lock-in and the associated fear of vulnerability. The economic crisis has also contributed to and been a catalyst for open-source software (OSS) consideration and adoption. Small and large enterprises that previously scoffed at OSS alternatives are now taking a second look, and electing to adopt OSS.

MoSync is based on a dual-mode licensing model. If MoSync is licensed under a standard General Public License (GPL) open-source agreement, it is free for personal use and also free if application developers sell the applications commercially, on the basis that the source code is made available to others. In other cases (e.g., for developers who do not wish to publish their source code), there are commercial license agreements available from MoSync as an alternative.

Challenges: As more cross-platform development tools become available, the competitive environment for these providers will increase — from external competitors, such as Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) and Nokia's Qt, and also from mobile enterprise application platform tools. There are also platform owners who impose restrictions, such as Apple, and although Gartner believes Apple will find it difficult to resist conforming to future Web standards, there are current limitations on tools for the popular iPhone.

Who Should Care: Anyone involved in developing, procuring or supporting mobile applications for either B2C, B2B or B2E, such as IT organizations, developers and business strategists, and who are, therefore, concerned with the high costs of and lengthy time process for porting applications should consider MoSync. For developers specifically, the use of cross-platform tools will also help boost the addressable market, and provide some insulation from the mobile platform wars.

Berlin, Germany (www.cortado.com )

Analysis by Monica Basso and Brian Gammage

Why Cool: Cortado, a division of ThinPrint, helps organizations to deploy enhanced real-time mobile collaboration experiences for mobile workers by extending the availability of current desktop process to smartphone devices. Organizations can connect consumer and personal devices to corporate desktop processes, such as printing and data access. By installing its application on the server side, integrated with Active Directory, it enables users to access virtual processes from devices. For example, a user can send a document to print from his or her smartphone to a remote printer, or can scan a document with the smartphone camera, convert it to PDF format, and save it to the online storage space, send it as an e-mail or print it on a remote printer. ThinPrint is an established vendor in the desktop market, where it delivers centralized printing capabilities for server-based computing (SBC) and hosted virtual desktop (HVD) deployments.

Cortado's capability taps into three key trends in enterprise user requirements: the centralization of exiting computing capabilities through HVDs and SBC, ongoing mobilization of enterprise applications, and consumerization. By enabling organizations to leverage centralized and existing desktop processes from smartphones in a device-independent manner, Cortado can potentially add value to current investments without significant operational costs.

Challenges: Although Cortado appears to have the right product at the right time, it may struggle to find itself in the "right place." A decision to take advantage of Cortado's virtual desktop processes requires the integration of planning and deployment decisions across the desktop, the data center and enterprise mobility strategies. Not every smartphone is supported, so target users must be equipped correctly and have the appropriate client-side applications deployed to their mobile devices. The appropriate desktop processes must be packaged and, in most cases, be delivered in the same way to PC users as well. Servers must be deployed to support these desktop processes. Only organizations able to holistically plan their infrastructures will be able to do this. As a small vendor, Cortado may struggle to engage with those responsible for such planning. The vendor will also need to broaden its marketing message beyond its ThinPrint parent, or risk being "pigeonholed" as a single-function point solution.

Who Should Care: Any organization looking to extend the use of smartphones, mobilize more applications and/or extend the use of HVDs should consider Cortado's approach. Organizations with an existing mobile computing footprint that are struggling with consumerization should also consider this approach as a mechanism for withdrawing more of their "presence" from smartphones they don't own or manage.

This nonexhaustive list of vendors indicates how mobile and wireless technologies and products continue to evolve to address emerging user needs and business opportunities. Organizations can leverage the capabilities of these products to pursue innovation in internal and customer-facing business processes:

• With Cortado, they can improve collaboration for mobile workers by extending desktop capabilities, such as printing to corporate or personal smartphones, in a cost-effective way.
• With Gamma Engineers, they can improve customer services by deploying packaged, context-aware mobile applications across multiple device platforms, integrated with call centers and Web services.
• With Appcelerator and MoSync, they have two different approaches to develop mobile B2C applications across multiple platforms. While Appcelerator is a JavaScript mapping of native APIs plus some platform independent APIs, Mosync is a platform-independent abstract API set. Appcelerator's goal is to make native API programming more productive, while Mosync's goal is to have 100% cross-platform source code (and, therefore, will not be able to wrap all native features).

CIOs, chief marketing officers, IT strategists, business development managers and innovation managers should consider these Cool Vendors to identify opportunities to enhance mobile workforce collaboration and mobile CRM.