Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 04 | Page 79

FINAL WORD M obile phone user base in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) is second only to that in AsiaPacific, with “just over 606 million people in this region having at least one mobile phone, and the total will pass 789 million in 2019”, according to a report released by eMarketer, the independent market research company, that conducted the survey on digital trends in tandem with Starcom Mediavest Group (SMG). Out of the total mobile users, the number of smartphone users in MEA was forecast to be around 106 million at the end of 2015. Enterprise brings back-end challenges to the fore Many enterprises rely upon proprietary www.intelligentcio.com applications that were developed decades ago, long before mobile devices became ubiquitous. These immensely valuable applications often include ERP, CRM, BPM, database applications, medical records, energy management systems, and flight management systems: none of which were originally designed to interface with today’s mobile devices. Any changes to these “monolithic” applications require costly and timeconsuming redevelopment, testing and redeployment of server-side code. Integrating mobile apps securely with these rich back-end data sources and applications is at the heart of successful enterprise mobility. INTELLIGENTCIO 79