Mobile development teams not up to the job, say CIOs

CIOs are predicting a 50% increase in the number of business applications going mobile in the next three years, but development teams are struggling to keep pace.

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The research from Vanson Bourne, which was commissioned by Micro Focus, surveyed 590 global CIOs. It predicts that 46% of business applications will be mobile by 2016, compared with 31% this year.

Almost 80% of respondents said they are using a combination of in-house and outsourced teams, and one-third of all the CIOs questioned were not confident the teams could develop and deliver to the business's requirements. CIOs labelled these teams “sluggish, middling or outpaced.” 

Businesses using mainframes are struggling even more, and 78% of the respondents said having a mainframe made developing or implementing mobile applications that work with their existing systems more difficult, while 86% said suppliers and developers were "more reticent to work with mainframe organisations”.

“Mobile apps play a critical role in every organisation’s business strategy," said Archie Roboostoff, Borland solutions portfolio director at Micro Focus. "However, the consumer in all of us is demanding more, and companies are under increasing pressure to release higher quality mobile apps faster and more often than ever before."

The most popular platform on which to develop mobile apps is Android, with 78% of respondents developing on the platform. Apple iOS was the next most popular, with 65% of respondents using it, followed by the Windows Phone platform, used by 52%. BlackBerry came fourth, with 36% using it, while only 7% are using Symbian.

According to Gartner, 56% of the 147,000 smartphones sold globally in the first three months of 2012 were Android-based devices, 22.5% ran iOS, 6.8% were RIM-based and 1.9% ran Microsoft.