What is enterprise app development? | 2021 Guide
Enterprise Application Development: Introduction
In past times, businesses needed large teams, in-house resources, and long, exhausting waterfall processes to be able to develop the software they needed. Limitations of technology made the software development process much harder than it is today. However, in this high-tech era, a successful business has enterprise application development available at the tips of its fingers.
“More than a thousand new apps are hitting the market each day. In this fast-moving era of entrepreneurship and creativity, is the security keeping up? Apps and devices often rely on consumer data- including contact information, photos, and location to name a few — and can be vulnerable to digital snoops, data breaches, and real-world thieves. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the nation’s consumer protection agency, offers these tips to help developers approach app and software security.” [1]
To truly understand the importance and influence of enterprise applications, let us first define what it really means.
What is Enterprise Application Development?
Enterprise application development is a process by which a company develops software or technology aiming to better its business model. It then uses this software to improve employee efficiency, streamline its operations, and strengthen its impact on the market.
Today, business enterprises are rapidly entering the age of the ‘connected customer’. This means that an enterprise’s connection and communication with its customers offer enormous value. This connection can give way to valuable information about customer buying behavior and market trends, but an application is needed to unlock and study these patterns so that this data can be applied for the benefit of the business. This is where enterprise software development comes in.
Enterprise software development offers a newer, more collaborative, and agile approach to IT. The basic purpose is to build applications that give a better understanding of and incorporate the buyer’s needs. To grasp the rising need for enterprise application development, it is important to have a thorough understanding of enterprise mobility.
What is Enterprise Mobility?
Enterprise mobility is a modern approach to working in which employees can work remotely using devices and applications. Generally, this term refers to the usage of mobile devices for business purposes, but can also involve the mobility of workers and corporate data.
Enterprise mobility is an important part of the wave of technologies that have emerged to help businesses enable remote working and combat increasing digital security risks. Enterprise mobility is important because it makes business flexible, thus, increasing productivity and employee job satisfaction. In recent years, nearly every sector of business has integrated some form of enterprise mobility into its business processes.
3 Examples of Enterprise Applications
- Customer Relationships Management (CRM)
Prioritizing customer relationships is essential for the success of any business. Sure, your sales representatives might be good at their job, but having a state-of-the-art application to support this sector of your business will make the process even more efficient.
A customer relationship management system will ensure that your team is aware of every single customer. It will help you organize data better, and prevent your employees from missing out on important opportunities to market new services to existing clients.
PowerGate Software’s team can custom-build an application to meet your customer relationship needs. Our streamlined and high-tech software will allow you to track how, when, and where you have interacted with a customer, and ensure that no lead is left undeveloped. We can help you to manage orders, communicate with present and future clients, track their statuses, and so much more.
- Supply Chain Management (SCM)
Supply chain management is an integral part of the business process. Every manufacturing company needs proper resources to manage storage, shipping, distribution, and stocks. If the supply chain process is not quick, organized, and interactive, a business can suffer from major financial losses. Smaller-scale businesses can make do without an application, but specialized software becomes important, if not necessary, for multi-location enterprises that are managing hundreds of supplies.
Having a specialized SCM software or application can help facilitate the inventory flow. Such applications can help you with order processing, logistics, distribution, shipment, warehousing, and so on, and be of great value in automating the entire process. Companies like PowerGate Software can build a cloud-based Supply Chain Management app for you from scratch, tailoring it to your company’s unique needs.
- Marketing Automation
No matter how large or small your business is, or what sector it caters to, marketing is the ultimate make-or-break factor for any business’s success.
When a company grows and reaches a certain size, conducting all marketing manually can become extremely difficult, no matter how large of a workforce you have. If you are facing a similar problem, a cloud-based marketing solution app might be the answer for you.
Customized marketing software can help you build highly personalized marketing campaigns, automate communication, segment your audiences, and assess your marketing schemes. This is ideal if you wish to replace long and taxing manual processes such as Excel sheets and databases, and can greatly help streamline and modernize your business’s marketing procedures.
The Benefits and the Challenges
In 2020, the worldwide revenue of enterprise software development was a whopping $209.4 billion US dollars! This number makes it clear that enterprise application development is being embraced by hundreds of thousands of businesses across the globe – predominantly because of the number of advantages they can provide to companies working in various industries. Here’s a look at some of the benefits and challenges of enterprise software development.
The Benefits
- Improvement in Management and Sharing Of Data
Ensuring communication and collaboration between different departments of a business is necessary for the business to run effectively. An agile enterprise application software solution can help increase interactivity and coordination between business sectors, improving overall organization and efficiency in business processes.
- Streamline and Automate Internal Processes
Enterprise apps can help in streamlining and automating key business processes, helping your company rise and meet challenges easily. Automation can mean different things for different businesses.
To what extent the automation is carried out is completely up to you. You might want to completely automate a low-value task to help your employees, or only wish to make minor changes to improve efficiency. Whichever the case, PowerGate Software can meet all your demands.
- Flexibility in IT infrastructure
Enterprise web and software allow organizations to develop IT facilities and to respond to increasing market demands. Not every worker in a business is extremely tech-savvy and can face problems in utilizing innovative technologies, which may lead the business to fall behind its competition.
Enterprise application development can help in solving these hurdles and streamlining the entire business process, improving business functionality, and generating greater revenue.
- Creating New Opportunities
One of the biggest benefits of enterprise software is how it allows businesses to identify new market opportunities and respond to them quickly and properly. Such applications can help companies address shifts in the market, and evolve their policies to stay on top of the ever-changing business game.
- Increasing Efficiency
Increased business efficiency is the top reason why so many businesses are integrating enterprise applications within their work procedures. It improves functionality, increases efficiency, makes communication easier, and reduces the overall time and effort employees spend responding to each problem.
With the help of enterprise development companies like PowerGate Software, you can turn your business around. Our cloud-based personalized solutions can help you realize the holistic advantages of your investments and bring great financial benefits to your company.
The Challenges
- Changing Business requirements
A business landscape is ever-changing, sometimes without warning. This is why it’s extremely important to make sure company policies and strategies are always flexible. Luckily for you, PowerGate Software has over 9 years of experience in this game, and we can rise to the occasion and help your company navigate through unforeseen shifts and challenges.
- Ensuring a Return On Your Investment
Most businesses shy away from hiring enterprise application development services because they fear they might not get a return on their investment. But with PowerGate, you can put your worries aside. With our over 96% customer satisfaction rate, we can help automate your field operations, streamline your business processes and give you results worth every penny you spend.
- Employee Engagement
Integrating enterprise applications into your business processes is bound to be beneficial, but only if your employees are on board with these changes. After all, they are the ones who will be making the greatest use of the software, so make sure you properly introduce such large-scale changes to your employees and train them to capitalize on the high-tech software for the best possible results. When done right, you will be giving your employees a tool that will make their work easier, and benefit your business in the long run.
Setting Business Goals for Enterprise Mobility
Enterprise application development technologies are designed to improve all facets of your business, but this can only be done if they are completely in line with your business goals.
Before hiring a company to design a software solution for you, make sure you take a moment to figure out exactly what your business needs.
- Are you looking to better manage your company resources?
- Do you aim to increase your business revenue?
- Are there any inefficiencies in the business process that you need to fix?
- Do you need a tool to motivate and better interact with your employees?
Finding answers to these questions is vital. Once you know precisely what you are looking for, you can tell us your demands and needs. This will help us determine exactly how to go about meeting your requirements and coming up with a solution that will best deliver the required results.
Enterprise Mobility Starts with Your Employees
Any applications that will require employee engagement need to be thoroughly planned out. Sure, PowerGate can design an outstanding app that meets all your business needs, but will your employees be able to take it up?
If you are automating your business procedures with the help of enterprise app development, there will likely be major changes in your business’s everyday work happenings. Since your employees are the people who will be carrying these procedures out, you need to ensure that they are on board with these changes.
Before hiring our services, you can ask yourself a few questions to determine how the app you wish to operate will affect your employee’s work and productivity. Will this app benefit your employees? How so? How will it impact their everyday work life? Will it boost their productivity? Will these changes translate well onto their work ethic? Will they find the application easy to use and apply?
Once you have determined the answers to these key questions, we can help you by designing an application that will prove to be of value to your business.
The Enterprise Application Development Process
- The Design Phase
At the beginning of the enterprise application development process, the major work depends on you. You need to consider your overall business goals and strategy and how the app you are getting developed will affect the lives of your employees and clients. It’s also good to set some future goals at this stage, as this gives you an idea of what impact you are expecting the app to have on your business.
No matter what sector your business operates in, your main goal should be to implement software that will improve the lives of your employees, with features that will suit your business model well and improve your efficiency.
It’s important for you to determine your goals so that you can communicate that to the software development team. Then, the professionals will determine the core features the app needs to have and construct a basic design module for the application.
- The Development Phase
Once you’ve effectively communicated your needs and demands, the development phase begins. The development company will write code that caters to your business’s requirements and ensure a seamless and intuitive user experience.
At PowerGate, we take it upon ourselves to reflect the needs of users and make the app as simple and easy to use as possible. Our services come with an infallible guarantee of excellence, and we always ensure that the software is efficient and complete bug-free. Helping your business grow and evolve is our main goal, and we want to make sure that everything is running as smoothly as possible.
- The Deployment Phase
The deployment phase involves thorough and complete testing of the enterprise app. The development company will consider all source code, documentation, interface, and interactions within the software. Testing is one of the most important steps in enterprise app development, and the company will carry out multiple tests to truly ensure the app is running efficiently.
There are also improvements and changes made at this stage. If the app is not delivering well or isn’t meeting a particular goal that was set, the developer will tweak the design and try to make it as streamlined and effective as possible.
Once the development company and your business both are satisfied with the app, it will then be released, and you’re free to adapt it into your daily business happenings. However, the work doesn’t always end here. As business needs and technology evolves, you should also get the app updated to ensure it is continuously meeting your goals and your customers’ needs.
Choosing an App Development Agency
The company you work with will play an essential role in the enterprise development process. Ideally, you should be looking for a team with several years of experience, skilled software developers, and a good eye for detail.
The company should be willing to cater to your specific requirements and tailor-make a solution-based application that will help improve your business model. You should also be looking for a team that can work with a variety of technologies and has experience in varying fields. PowerGate Software can offer you all of the above, and more.
Main Types of Enterprise Applications
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
- Business Intelligence (BI)
- Business Continuity Planning (BCP)
- Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)
- Email marketing systems
- Payment processing system
- Enterprise Content Management
- Enterprise Messaging Systems (EMS)
- HR Management
PowerGate: The Ideal Enterprise Application Development Software
Looking for a software development team that offers quality, cost-effectiveness, speed, and excellence all in one? PowerGate Software is the company for you!
With over 9 years of experience in enterprise application development and over 180 clients served globally, working with PowerGate is the best thing you can do for your business. Our team comprises dedicated, innovative, and skilled individuals with years of expertise in their fields. We are always thinking of new ways we can enhance business operations and procedures, and our tight-knit team of expert developers will be delighted to work with you!
Frequently Asked Questions – Enterprise Application Development
- What are enterprise apps?
An enterprise app is a large-scale software platform that is designed for a corporate environment. This software helps enhance business efficiency and productivity by providing the business with necessary functional support.
- What are examples of enterprise applications?
Here are some popular enterprise application examples:
- Datapine
- Slack
- Salesforce
- Google Analytics
- Jira
- Survey Monkey
- Zendesk
- Sage
- What does an enterprise developer do?
Enterprise application development companies like PowerGate Software program core business applications onto a cloud and network infrastructure. We use technologies like NodeJS, iOS, Angular, Javascript, Python, AWS, and DevOps to help businesses reimagine their offerings, generate greater revenue, and unlock new customer value.
References
- The Federal Trade Commission. https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/appdevelopers-start-security
