A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

PLM: Mobile-Optimized Sites vs. Mobile Apps

PLM: Mobile-Optimized Sites vs. Mobile Apps
Oleg
Oleg
23 January, 2012 | 2 min for reading

For most non-technology-savvy people, the title of this post can sound like a joke. Mobile apps are trending today. App store, Android stores, Microsoft is planning to re-born Windows phone with future versions of Windows and mobile app. How it can die? Looking on this following graph from article (Apps user overtakes web) on Mashable last year, you can hardly predict something wrong may happen to mobile apps.

However, among technology people the discussion about apps vs. web is not unusual. Those of use, who stays long enough in the business, still remember multi-platform discussions of Unix vs. Windows. You can catch up on my previous post on this topic – PLM and Multi-platform development. I did catch the following picture on on the web polls (unfortunately lost the link). The context of the audience was development people. This is indeed important to mention. You can clearly see people are focusing the development on mobile-oriented sites.

Mobile-Optimized Sites vs. Mobile Apps

The development side of this story is simple. Mobile Apps is our back to multi-platform development. It cost additional money and requires more complicated development organization compared to mobile-optimized websites that can provide some pain relief. You can take a look on a good comparison of two strategies on devbridge blog. I believe, the discussion is on the way, and it is far from a final word. You certainly need to remember the right keyword for the future – HTML 5. You can read more about this on one of my older posts.

What is my conclusion? I’m going to make my conclusion specifically talking about PLM mobile apps. PLM vendors followed technological and consumer trends to develop mobile applications. It sounds as a very important strategy these days, which cause huge interest from companies, users, analysts and industry watchers. Taking into account the long development cycle of enterprise applications and speed of adoption in manufacturing domain, I think software companies better have been not only short – term, but some longer-term development strategy that will allow them to jump to the next trend when it comes. For the moment, let’s rock available PLM mobile apps on iTunes app store and Android Market. I’m certainly interested to hear what do you think. And if you’re developing PLM apps, I like to know what is your opinion. Speak your mind.

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
8 May, 2009

  Life around us is changing dramatically. The current global economic situation and technology have the potential to change the...

7 May, 2013

Mobile is hyping, trending, skyrocketing… You name it. Everything goes mobile these days. Many developers of enterprise apps are asking...

20 October, 2014

Workflows and processes. This is an important part of any company. Like blood goes through your body, workflows are going...

18 June, 2013

Data is a fascinating topic these days. The amount of data is growing and it raises lots of concerns on...

12 July, 2018

Collaboration is one of these words that always created lot of confusion. For the last few years, we’ve seen CAD...

27 November, 2011

The story of standards is always fascinating. I love these stories on my blog and spent quite a lot of...

28 September, 2010

Somebody asked me last week about how I see th future of PLM… Does it look like-BOM or like-Workflow? I...

6 December, 2010

I read the following blog post by Christine Longwell – Do we really need structured workflows if we have visibility...

16 July, 2020

The big news came yesterday – Siemens and SAP announced a new partnership. Here is the link to SAP announcement...

Blogroll

To the top