Yves Neidlinger:  National Channel Sales & Marketing Manager

I just returned from my 3rd HIMSS conference and lucky for me, it was on home field turf in Atlanta. For the uninitiated, HiMSS stands for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. Think of it as a massive trade show relating to all things technology and healthcare.

Last year, I wrote about the growing trend of healthcare and mobility blog post: http://www.navara.com/blog/healthcare-and-mobility  and I’m happy to see that more vendors are realizing the market potential for mobile solutions. Not too long ago, I would commonly hear companies question the value of mobility, but those doubts are long gone. Today, the biggest concerns are which platforms to support and how to create a compelling mobile application that meets the needs of its users.

Ten years ago, the mobile device landscape was much simpler. You either were in the Palm or Pocket PC camp. Blackberry was just coming into the scene and other devices such as Psion and Sharp’s Zaurus had already seen their heyday. Today, the mobile device market is much more diverse with Blackberry, Windows Mobile, iPhone, Android and to a lesser extent, Symbian. Let’s not forget the burgeoning tablet, netbook, iPad market.

If you were an ISV (ten years ago) your choices were very simple, you developed your mobile application for Palm and/or Windows Mobile. Today, most organizations are too resource constrained to develop for each commercially available platform. What’s a software developer to do?

Enter Mobile Process Enablement. If you’re scratching your head, saying huh? I’ll explain.  MPE is the acronym for middleware solutions that allow for the rapid development of mobile applications that tie into existing databases.  In other words, they provide a quick way to develop a mobile app that is an extension of a desktop or cloud application.

The rational for leveraging an MPE solution is that with minimal development resources a developer can offer their application onto a variety of mobile devices without having to worry about building proprietary applications that must be constantly maintained and supported. Oftentimes, a mobile middleware platform can save about 90% of the development and support costs.

Did that get your attention?