Tech Insights: Interview with Alan Williams, BlinkMobile

What do you see as the single biggest challenge facing the ICT industry in the year ahead?

Meeting the varied demands of corporate users for mobile apps that will transform their business processes (taking out the friction, improving efficiencies and enhancing service), without ending up with an uncontrolled app rash. Other implications of this challenge involve managing the rapid and continual development demands without duplicating data or compromising security and leaving the organisation vulnerable to threats.

What do you see as the two or three biggest growth opportunities for your customers in 2016?

Contextually aware productivity apps; integration of beacons and other proximity, scanning and notification technologies; and drilling further into their business processes and expanding both the quantity and capabilities of apps within their 'soldier app' fleet.

What new and innovative technologies do you see emerging in your IT solution categories in 2016, and how will they help your customers?

Low-cost, integrated modular readers (such as iProximity's IPR) that will read and write RFID/NFC, transmit a beacon signal, detect a beacon, detect a device through Wi-Fi and read barcodes. These devices will make it practical for almost any organisation to engage with their customers, patients, staff or users in new ways through cloud-based location services teamed with contextually aware mobile apps.

They're not new, but wearables are rapidly becoming genuinely useful with the Apple Watch and the LG Urbane now genuine alternatives to a standard watch but with the ability to receive notifications and provide simple responses to great effect in specific work activities. Other forms of wearables that monitor heart rate, temperature, blood pressure and breathing rates will become fundamental requirements of WHS/welfare centric apps.

What are your customers demanding of you more today than five years ago? How will you meet these requirements?

In the enterprise mobile space our world changes and advances so quickly that five years ago we were still just talking to most clients about mobile-friendly web and e-forms along with SMS notifications within workflows.

Now, our customers expect to be able to rapidly produce any number of enterprise-grade mobile apps to improve their business processes. But also to have them hosted and supported in a robust environment so they don't have to worry about the demands of different servers and software, upgrades and compatibility, security or licences. They want a single point of contact with SLAs covering the entire solution.

Do you expect to face an increasing burden of new legislation and regulations? How will your company tackle this?

There was the change to the Privacy Act last year but it didn't impact us greatly as typically we don't hold personal data. And while we're not facing much new legislation, we do need to respond to our clients' issues of changing legislation/regulations along with increased accountability as they increasingly turn to mobility as a way to address such issues.

Alan Williams is a director and CTO for BlinkMobile, and was the original product architect of the Blink Mobility Platform. He is responsible for research and development, testing, support and education within the company. Alan has spent over 30 years in the software industry and prior to BlinkMobile was a founding member and VP of TIBCO.