When Australian software giant Atlassian announced in it was acquiring Trello for A$577m , it sent a signal that the enterprise app development market was alive and kicking.
Trello allows companies which rely on collaboration within their teams to project manage collaborations by creating digital post-it notes and white boards where team members can share information. The software compliments Atlassian software aimed at software developers.
In February 2016, Microsoft spent a not dissimilar amount of money buying Xamarin , which allows enterprise apps to be written once and run on multiple devices. Again, it was seen as a signal that the enterprise app market was worth the serious money being spent by suppliers on platforms to support app development.
However, according to Gartner principal research analyst Adrian Leow , the adoption, release and creation of enterprise apps remains low. A global survey of enterprises conducted late last year revealed that on average companies had just eight deployed apps, a further 2.6 in development and 6.2 on the drawing board.
“It’s abysmally poor,” said Leow. While employees are keen to use consumer-style apps to provide access to and flexibility with enterprise applications, companies remain perplexed about how to deliver that.
