Gartner: Critical Capabilities for Mobile Application Development Platforms

While a bit dated, but this Gartner Analysis is still one of the best pieces out there racking and stacking some of the top solutions providers in the MADP space. Some key findings:

• Enterprises typically consider a wide range of vendors when selecting a mobile application development platform (MADP). MADP vendors come from a wide range of backgrounds — mobile, Web, business-to-employee (B2E) and business-to-consumer (B2C). While this set of vendors has matured and to a large extent converged, we expect the differences in the capabilities to support B2C- and B2E-oriented mobile application development (AD) to remain through 2015.
• The continued growth and diversity in mobile platforms make multichannel options increasingly attractive, but rapid evolution means that multichannel vendors continue to be stretched to quickly accommodate new OS variants and device form factors.
• Support for hybrid AD (wrapping modern Web technologies like HTML5, JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets 3 [CSS3] within native code containers) is increasing across the vendors in this report.
• The vendor scores have improved significantly since last year’s analysis, despite the challenges and complexities of mobile AD. Most vendors are rated either Excellent or Good, at least in part, because only Challengers, Leaders and Visionaries are rated here.

The report rates and compares 10 MADP solutions providers who, as you can read directly above this sentence, are also featured in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant as  challengers, leaders and visionaries. This still leaves out a lot of good solutions providers that we have listed in our solutions directory. Also, just so everyone knows, we at Solutions Review don’t try to rank solutions ourselves, but just report what others out there are saying. Gartner, on the other hand, isn’t constrained by those guidelines, and in this report has consistently placed Antenna Software, Syclo and SAP in the top 3 of its capabilities rankings, with Kony Solutions and Appcelerator making cameos for B2C use, knocking Syclo sown to 5th in that category. Adobe, Dojo and JQuery generally bring up the rear in the rankings, and Sencha, Kony, Appcelerator, and Verivo float in the middle of the pack, with the exceptions noted above.

I do feel that this Gartner report is definitely worth your time, especially if you are considering one or several of the solutions included. For the full report, follow this link.