By Megan Oster
It is no secret that mobile has become a driving force in customer behaviors, as well as an enormous influence on customer relationships. And mobile is redefining many industries such as retail. For example, SHARE Orlando 2015 speaker, Michael Casile of IBM, revealed in a session on mobile that Cyber Monday mobile traffic accounted for 40 percent of all online traffic – a 30.1 percent increase from 2013. Mobile sales also gained traction, making up 22 percent of total Cyber Monday online sales – an increase of 27.6 percent from the previous year.
There is no skirting the issue: a mobile strategy is critically important to business today. It gives organizations the ability to offer premium customer service, broaden their market reach, affords them opportunities to increase revenue and provides tools to improve operational efficiency.
Fortunately, a solution designed to aid users in leveraging mobile for mainframe applications is available. By using IBM MobileFirst Portfolio, users can do the following: transform the value chain to drive growth and ROI, protect and manage the mobile infrastructure to optimize performance, build and deploy mobile applications efficiently and engage customers in context by leveraging mobile insights.
MobileFirst Portfolio offers users guidance in designing mobile applications, facilitating an easier, more efficient process. Features include architectural patterns for integration of cloud, enterprise and mobile systems; models and arch diagrams; support for requirements from industries such as retail, banking, telecommunications and government; customization of pre-populated assets for accelerated project delivery; and templates for mobile reference architecture. The program is also an excellent training tool for those wishing to bridge the mobile skills gap.
It is important to note that the MobileFirst platform foundation server, running on Linux in z systems, facilitates centralized connectivity to z/OS applications. It is simple to maintain and standards-based. Plus, the server adapters provide secure connectivity to back-end systems – a critical benefit in the age of cyber attacks.
And even without MobileFirst Portfolio, users can rest assured that z systems are a good fit for mobile. They deliver seamless workload management, ensuring high priority jobs meet desired service levels. Additionally, z systems support mobile with built-in redundancy for the highest level of availability, along with the least amount of downtime of any server. Finally, the technology supports a high volume of transaction rates for mobile applications, providing the levels of performance industries such as banking require.