Centric

The iPhone Is 1995 All Over Again

In 1995, forward-looking businesses were just beginning to consider if the World Wide Web would be beneficial to marketing and customer relations. Today, business leaders can’t imagine not having a web site to promote their offering, serve their customers, and sell their products. Centric believes the current state of mobile computing, powered by surprisingly robust handset devices such as the iPhone, is analogous to the Web circa 1995.

The rapid rise and impact of mobile devices is not lost on us. Right now, the majority of people worldwide use a mobile handset device as their only access to the Internet. But what most companies fail to realize is that the iPhone is not only about "business as usual", the iPhone is about "business as it never was." Today's most successful iPhone-based business applications possess a social awareness that lets your organization connect with your employees, customers, and partners in ways that were previously not possible.

If it hasn’t happened already, soon your enterprise and your customers are going to require a mobile computing / smart phone approach to interacting with your company. And the game-changing iPhone is at the forefront of the revolution due to its:

• Brilliant interface allowing for easy access of back-office data and applications
• Status as the absolute coolest corporate branding and promotional vehicle
• Corporate readiness: it fully supports Microsoft’s Exchange, encrypted data transmission and storage, remote device wipe, enterprise configuration via policy-based toolsets, and of course a practically unlimited number of third party business apps.

How Can We Streamline Your Efforts?

Centric is all about the iPhone business app. We understand the nuances of planning, building and deploying an application within Apple’s development environment. From seamlessly accessing your back-office data and systems to moving your browser-based applications to the iPhone UI form factor, Centric experts span the complete application development lifecycle (UI design, application build, test, Apple app approval and store deployment, ongoing support and maintenance). Examples of things we love to work on include:

• Field service applications (inspections, surveys, scheduling),
• Business intelligence, data display and delivery in iPhone-friendly formats,
• Time and expense applications,
• Transactional applications, and
• Application porting and migrations.

Why Centric?

When it comes to iPhone development, finding technological-proficiency is not difficult. But finding a developer that also understands how to extend your business to a mobile device to actually enhance and extend your capabilities is much more rigorous proposition. We're fortunate to have already developed applications covering all parts of the iPhone SDK. However, unlike most developers, we are also completely fluent in the architectural knowledge required outside the iPhone itself. Suddenly, getting your application to market is much more than a simple matter of code proficiency.

At Centric, we know technology, but we also know business and how these back-office IT gears intermesh. An app developer that does not consider the complete business process and can seamlessly integrate the app to your server-side architecture may actually be making the process worse than if no app were created for it! Centric’s iPhone team comes to the table with a complete understanding of:

• The iPhone’s inner workings, software architecture, and 3.0 SDK,
• How to architect a service layer between the handset and your existing server-side architecture and,
• The tricky aspects of mobile handset development (application efficiency, optimized algorithms, efficient memory usage, and careful network usage).

Click here to see how Centric has utilized the iPhone to streamline our own back office processes.