Private enterprise app stores enable IT to offer secure, vetted access to approved programs, as well as remote management of bring-your-own devices. (Source: Partnerpedia)
Today most enterprise users have to visit the Apple App Store to download even the apps approved by their own company. However, according to a recent survey corporate users want private enterprise app stores that not only distribute malware-free apps, but which also distribute multi-media content and which integrate IT management functions for the all computing devices, from smartphones to tablets to laptops to desktop computers.
In fact, according to Gartner Inc., 60 percent of IT organizations plan to deploy their own Enterprise App Stores by 2014, a sentiment echoed by a recent Partnerpedia survey which found that 58 percent of its corporate IT respondents planned to open their own app stores within the next 12 months.
"Mobile devices and apps are the driver behind companies reformulating their enterprise mobility strategy," said Sam Liu, vice president of marketing at Partnerpedia, whose enterprise survey indicates that corporate thinking and planning should move beyond just mobile apps to support laptops, desktops, and their media files.
Apple itself has acknowledged this trend by opening an App Store for its laptop and desktop users, as well as integrating the kind of remote management and cloud-computing resources assessable from its smartphones and tablets into the latest version of it laptop and desktop operating system OS-X Mountain Lion (due out this summer).
Partnepedia's enterprise survey mirrors these sentiments finding that corporate users not only support the bring-your-own-device philosophy (77 percent), allowing corporate users to use their own favorite smartphone or tablet for company work, but also that those same corporate users favor IT managing all their devices including laptops (76 percent) and desktop computers (64 percent).
Nearly all respondents favored Enterprise App Store policies that vet apps for malware, whether they were written by enterprise IT or by third parties, and the overwhelming majority also favored iTunes-like multi-media content distribution for all types of content including documents like PDFs, eBooks, spreadsheets, and videos.
The survey also asked IT managers and software authors what formats they were planning on using to release their next-generation apps, revealing only a slight edge to native apps, with universal HTML5 apps being favored by nearly half the respondents.
Regarding Enterprise App Store services, over 86 percent of corporate respondents rated the need for self-service functions as high to very high and nearly all respondents expected IT managers to use the Enterprise App Store to control publishing, distribution and management of approved apps to end-user devices.
