The Information Supply Chain and the Growth of Enterprise App Stores

Analysts at Forrester and Gartner are seeing a rise in adoption of enterprise app stores. As Forrester looks ahead a few years, they see corporate app stores moving beyond distribution of corporate-approved mobile apps to provide content sharing, granular discovery, provisioning, and reporting and monitoring services. Forrester goes so far as to predict that app stores will become the primary way for individuals to obtain applications.* Gartner predicts that by 2016, 60% of enterprise app stores will be primarily composed of third-party apps rather than enterprise-developed apps and that by 2017, 25% of enterprises will have an enterprise app store for managing corporate-sanctioned apps on PCs and mobile devices.**

I talked about this recently with Donald Farmer, our VP Product Management. A concept that’s on his mind when thinking about enterprise app stores is the information supply chain. How will all these apps be able to deliver the information users need so they can ask and answer streams of questions on their own?

In a traditional environment IT would build, own, and manage the entire experience of information, from sources to analysis and visualization. But in the supply chain model, an enterprise data warehouse is only one element of the information landscape, with many peripheral apps extending and augmenting it. IT seeks to publish as much data as possible through APIs, feeds, and other mechanisms – even reports. While some of this infrastructure requires IT support and maintenance, in a supply chain model, the goal is always to provide users with direct access and do-it-yourself tools wherever possible.

* See the Forrester Research report, “Build A Corporate App Store Into Your Corporate Mobility Strategy,” January 16, 2013 (available to Forrester subscribers or for purchase).

** See the Gartner reports, “Enterprise App Stores Can Increase the ROI of the App Portfolio,” February 4, 2013 and “There’s an App for That: The Growth of Enterprise Application Stores,” September 7, 2012 (available to Gartner subscribers).