Tim Rea, Palringo CEO comments on where enterprise apps will emerge from:
...the move to support emerging enterprise demand isn’t a trivial exercise and brings with it some serious responsibilities, but established providers of consumer services have massive advantages. They have a customer base that can generate a steady flow of leads for new enterprise customers and they can demonstrate stability, reliability and scalability by pointing to an existing user base. In contrast, smaller developers that set out to deliberately target enterprise customers are likely to find it difficult to convince corporate IT departments of their operational credibility.
Given he's the CEO of a popular consumer messaging app Tim Rea "would say that", but he's completely right... Consumer mobile services are light-years ahead of enterprise offerings and purchasing decisions are being shaped by the devices and services CIOs use at home. Consumer services are also setting expectations about pricing, presentation, usability and speed of development - all things traditional enterprise software providers are comparatively poor at. I also witnessed a CIO describe Apple's iPhone as the 'only mobile that mattered' convinced (for the most part) by the queues he'd passed at an Apple Store on iPhone 4 launch day.
The power of seeing something working should not be underestimated and I have witnessed CIOs describing their requirements to vendors referencing the apps they use (and the characteristics of their iPhones typically) on a number of occasions. It won't be too long before those app-makers are in the room instead...