Plug my back-end before my front end!

Gegevens gegevens overal maar geen druppel te drinken

It’s getting to that time of year when people sleep on the streets of London without being drunk; moustaches are grown and various award ceremonies up and down the land hold auctions or raffles to help those less fortunate than ourselves.

Viva the channel awards!

But, against this backdrop of giving and guilt, we find ourselves invaded by sleeping-bag wielding citizens reading Steve Jobs biographies and sleeping rough to spend the entire yearly soup kitchen budget of Bondway (http://www.thamesreach.org.uk) to get the latest shiny Apple product

So what’s all the fuss about?

And why do we need it?

And why are people still prepared to camp out over night for IT kit?

I thought point releases went out with the Spice Girls and in comparison, reference, nobody gave a toss when Thor over at RIM recently delayed the latest Crackberry release!

Apart from the homeless, not a sleeping bag will be seen around the RIM outlets when the latest CrackBaz limps out.

The fuss, of course, was last week’s launch of the new Iphone 5 and IOS 6, chock full of lovely Apple intellectual property that we must not steal.

A few years ago I wouldn’t have bothered to tune into the launch as my customers would largely be using PCs and Crackbazzers, but things have dramatically changed for Apple in the enterprise space that potentially requires new skills and opportunities for the channel.

According to le chef du pomme, Macs are outstripping PCs in laptop sales, Ipads have dominance or some might say monopoly in the tablet market and the majority of Fortune 500 companies are developing shiny Apps for customers.

Apparently:

“Ducati retailers can give prospective customers a view of their bike and customization from an App;

“Finance companies can bridge into back end systems…. Via an APP.

And in the UK, entrepreneurs are developing specific Apps like “KEBABACAB” (TM) a cab ordering system that takes in the cash point, an off licence and Kebab shop on your suggested route home.

So with also this APP- Mac-Mania apparently happening in the enterprise I was interested in how the channel will respond and spoke to a mate of mine who had just returned from Dream Force in San Francisco.

Speaking at a well known public house in Soho, London, he put a whole different slant on the subject.

Although he agreed that iPhones and iPads are streaming in the door far quicker than the P45s are streaming out of the door, he was cautious about them and preferred a wait and see approach for running business applications.

“The whole outsourcing phenomena began on a promise of consolidating 3000 apps into 300….Let’s not let history repeat!,” he said

“So what if the Fortune 500 are delivering apps into the enterprise An app as a shiny interface is all very well but if the back end is s***e it is still just a nice interface into a sh*** back end.”

So the conclusion we got to around the 10th pint was it’s all very well that reseller customers bang on about mobile strategy and building apps as long as they have sorted out the back end that these Apps are connecting to.

Otherwise it’s like putting lipstick on a pig!