Oracle Magazine - July/August 2012

Catching Up to Mobile
Computing
Mobile computing presents challenges and opportunities
for architects.

If mobile computing isn’t already on your architect radar, it will be. Apple has sold 55 million iPads since 2010. Gartner expects a 98 percent increase in tablet sales in 2012, to 118 million. Nielsen reports that smartphones now account for nearly half of all mobile phones in the U. S., a 38 percent increase over 2011. And the mobile juggernaut is just getting started.

Karina Ishkhanova, technical lead for payment systems architecture and design at School-Day Solutions, sums up her take on the mobile challenge for architects in one word: uncertainty. That uncertainty, according to Ishkhanova, applies to the evolution of the operating systems for mobile apps, the availability of APIs and other necessary components, and the stability of data streams that can be interrupted at any time by lost connections or dead batteries.

“Properly designed, thought-through
architecture takes center stage and becomes
a matter of survival not only for single
applications but for entire companies,”
Ishkhanova says. “Mobile computing
demands data loss–tolerant architectures
with multiplatform adaptability and insanely
optimized resource usage.”
Those mobile computing demands place
an even greater importance on inter-
operability and standards, according to
Oracle ACE Director Ronald van Luttikhuizen,
managing partner at Vennster. “New devel-
opments happen so quickly nowadays that
your architecture needs to be able to support
the rapid development of new function-
ality and services,” van Luttikhuizen says.
“Mashups, cloud computing, and service ori-
entation are a few things that can help.“

Mike van Alst, an architect with MShift, believes that service orientation especially is key to mobile success. “Without service-

JULY/AUGUS T 2012 ORACLE. COM/ORACLEMAGAZINE
Smartphones now
account for nearly
half of all mobile
phones in the U.S.

oriented architecture (SOA), building mobile
applications may be a bridge too far,” he says.
“We need to make sure that mobile com-
puting converges with a SOA environment by
correlating service capabilities with the needs
of the mobile applications.”
Addressing the needs of mobile applica-
tions will require a head-on approach. “The
growth in mobile computing forces architects
to think about multichannel delivery from the
ground up rather than as an afterthought,”
says Anbu Krishnaswamy, an enterprise
architect at Oracle. “The challenge for archi-
tects is to identify the right content for the
right channel and reuse the plumbing under-
neath to provide consistent access to the
underlying business processes.”
An organization’s ability to reuse existing
“plumbing” and meet the increasing
demands of mobile computing depends
a great deal on the viability and integrity
of the organization’s existing architec-
ture. “The introduction of multichannel
support should have no major impact on an
architecture that has always followed best
practices and core architecture principles
of abstraction, modularity, and reuse,” he
says. “In theory, mobile devices become just
another delivery channel.”
Even so, adding and supporting that
mobile delivery channel won’t be without
its challenges. “The scalability of enterprise
systems will be put to the test,” says Oracle
ACE Director Lucas Jellema, CTO at AMIS
Services. “To alleviate that anticipated load,

blogs.oracle.com/archbeat
facebook.com/brhubart

smart caching solutions that leverage a
memory grid will play an important role.“
Folding mobile computing into the enter-
prise I T mix seems inevitable as consumers’
enthusiastic embrace of mobile computing
continues to change how they interact with
commercial, governmental, and social institu-
tions. But as with any disruptive change in the
enterprise I T landscape, new challenges mean
new opportunities for architects. 

Bob Rhubart
(bob.rhubart@oracle
.com) is manager of the
architect community
on Oracle Technology
Network, the host of the
Oracle Technology Network ArchBeat podcast
series, and the author of the ArchBeat blog
( blogs.oracle.com/archbeat).