Posts tagged conceptual

MEAP’s are going to be the new *aaS.  If you don’t understand that statement, consider yourself blessed.  Understanding technology industry analysts and acronyms is a difficult task. A relatively new category of Gartner Magic Quadrants have emerged one one in particular is a category that we think deserves a lot of attention.  Mobile Enterprise Application Platformsare not typical software like your daddy used to buy.  MEAP’s are collections of services and components (including frameworks, profiles, libraries and more) that facilitate the types of functionality required to develop and maintain applications running on wireless devices (aka mobile devices).Now I don’t subscribe to hype and BS and neither should you.  As the former chair of the OASIS Service Oriented Architecture Technical Committee, the group that produced the standard reference model for SOA, I never anticipated that people would run with this and start all these (INSERT ANY CAPITAL LETTER FROM THE ALPHABET HERE)aaS.  Software as a Service (SaaS) is not really that different from hosted solutions is it?  If you disagree, you’d better hurry and claim one while there are still letters left for acronyms.  I think XaaS is not used yet.

When I see value though, I want to point it out.  MEAP is one of those rare acronyms that seems to be vastly underestimated by the majority of the industry.  The term itself seems to have come from Analyst firm Gartner in a paper published in April 2011 (Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms, Michael J. King, William Clark). I believe I read somewhere that Gartner believes over 95% of the technology industry will use some form of MEAP by 2012.  When I try to research this topic on Google, very little information comes up.  Regardless of the title, let’s explore what a MEAP is and what it does.

In their paper, “The rule of three” is used as a quantifier for identifying when this functionality might be of interest.   Quoting from Gartner (via Wikipedia):

The Rule of Three refers to a concept developed by analyst firm Gartner, whereby companies are encouraged to consider the MEAP approach to mobility when they need their mobile solutions to:

• Support three or more mobile applications

• Support three or more mobile operating systems (OS)

• Integrate with at least three back-end data sources

According to Gartner, using a common mobility platform, like a MEAP, brings considerable savings and strategic advantages in this situation.

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