Taking Your Enterprise on the Road

Virtually every enterprise today faces a paradox -- their workforces are becoming increasingly mobile, while their enterprise applications are inherently immobile. The typical application today is centralized in a data center and can only be accessed by workers on the company network or by remote workers who have uninterrupted Internet connectivity.

For mobile users, being away from connectivity can mean being away from their applications and data.

It was assumed that persistent broadband wireless connectivity would solve the problem of application access. With a "wireless everywhere" infrastructure and an Intel Corp Centrino-enabled notebook, workers anywhere were supposed to be able to connect to their centralized applications. Aside from the scattered hotspots in Starbucks and airports, there simply is not the economic motivation for service providers to build out the additional infrastructure required for more widespread access.

So, the ball is firmly back in the court of the application developer. Without the assumption of persistent connectivity to the centralized data center, applications must be designed to sustain "roaming" in and out of constant connection. Applications should store updates locally and intelligently synchronize with the data center when connected. So instead of populating the user screen with error messages or making the application unavailable, the enterprise application is brought on the road. With most key business processes supported by critical enterprise applications, it makes little sense for them to be unavailable or unstable when used in mobile capacities.

Moving forward, application architectures must adapt to the new realities of the enterprise and become inherently mobile. These "mobilized" applications will enable workers constant access to their applications, independent from the state of network connectivity. This architecture also ensures that remote offices are not affected by technical issues in the network, or the corporate data center, so they can stay up and running at all times.The Roadblock to Application Mobilization: The Centralized Database

The centralized application database represents one of the thorniest problems in building mobilized application architectures, for the following reasons:

Market forces are breaking down these barriers. Cheap disk storage and powerful PCs make it possible and cost effective to distribute, store, and process vast amounts of data anywhere in the enterprise. Once, databases were centralized out of necessity. Today, however, it is quite possible to put the entire customer database on a salesperson's notebook. Additionally, today's corporate emphasis on disaster recovery and high availability, combined with slashed IT budgets, makes a redundant decentralized application infrastructure far more attractive and cost effective than the typical "fail-over" or "hot-standby" capital-intensive backup schemes used today.

Finally, open source databases and application servers enable companies to overcome the cost barriers inherent in traditional vendor licensing schemes, making it economically possible to deploy these system components in multiple locations at the edge of the network.

These factors set the scene for a new breed of mobilized applications, in which applications and their data can be distributed locally to remote offices and end-user platforms. The main question is, how?How to Mobilize

Heterogeneous bi-directional replication technologies provide the most powerful way for distributing and synchronizing databases across the enterprise. The fact that these technologies are now available allows a new approach to building distributed software solutions, so they are totally mobilized. The heterogeneity of these technologies enables cost-effective distributed architectures. Because companies can use any combination of databases, and because they are bi-directional, they enable companies to create incredibly redundant architectures populated by replicated systems.

This new class of distributed database applications does not eliminate the need for large centralized databases, but provides a robust environment in which data can be distributed -- providing end users with better quality of service and eliminating the dangerous single point-of-failure inherent in centralized database application architectures. By doing this, companies can preserve their investment in their current application architecture, but enhance it so that it is fully mobilized using bi-directional heterogeneous replication technology.

It's time for business applications to get out of the centralization time warp. Developers should take a long, hard look at their applications and evaluate the benefits of mobilizing them. Would end users benefit if your applications could continue to operate disconnected from a central database? Do you need to provide mobile workers with full-function applications and see no way to do so in a world dominated by centralized databases? Examine your application architecture, and you may find that the assumptions you have made about data are no longer valid.

In a world where bi-directional replication technologies let you move data to the user and keep that data synchronized without writing complex application code, and without having to build a reduced function application, the centralized application model seems as archaic as its forebear -- the mainframe architecture. This concept of mobilized applications may seem new today, but technology evolution, combined with market opportunity and competitive pressure, will make it commonplace tomorrow. And at that point, all end users will expect their critical applications to run disconnected from the network. They will expect to be able to take the enterprise on the road.D. Britton Johnston, Chief Technology Officer, PeerDirect Inc.