Cashing in on mobile apps: Local companies prosper as demand soars
PHOTO/COURTESY
Virtusa reduces app design time by offering three main mobile platforms. Pictured, left to right, are employees Abrar Shareef, Isaiah Decastro, Libby Rose, Praven Ram Gopu and Vincent Hueber.
It's difficult to overstate just how quickly mobile applications are catching on.
Two years ago, 26.3 billion apps were downloaded to devices worldwide, generating $8.3 billion in annual revenue for mobile app stores, according to Gartner. Today, 102 billion applications are downloaded annually, nearly four times as many, resulting in $26.7 billion of revenue, the Stamford Conn.-based technology research company said.
That's expected to triple to $76.5 billion by 2017, Gartner said, with some 268.7 billion apps downloaded to everything from phones to watches to glasses to automobiles.
Closer to home, Westborough-based Virtusa began preparations to launch a mobility division in late 2011 with three or four employees. The division now employs 300, according to Ansar Kassim, the company's head of mobility.
And in January, uTest announced it had raised $43 million, which is more than the Framingham-based application testing company had raised in all previous funding rounds combined. The company plans to go public within the next two years, said Matt Johnston, uTest's chief marketing and strategy officer.
“Doing mobile well allows companies to be in your pocket,” he said. “What you're talking about is being able to connect with users on their terms.”
But public-facing apps are just one segment of the market. The more developed — and perhaps more worthwhile — sector is made up of apps that businesses use internally.
Internal apps can do everything from tracking production control data at a manufacturing plant to compiling information about prospective customers for salespeople to providing doctors with patients' electronic health records.
These apps can increase employee productivity outside the office, said Ajay Kapur, vice president of product development at Acton-based Apps Associates LLC. They require a fraction of the boot-up time needed for laptops and can be used to access — or input — company information in remote locations without wireless internet access, said Doug Todd, the company's vice president of middleware practice.
Effective recruiting tool
Apps are also a good tool for recruiting young talent, Kassim said, and can be effective at training and familiarizing new workers with company procedures.
Apps also allow sales associates to enter data at the point it's being discussed, Todd said, resulting in more timely and accurate information. Or, doctors can carry tablets in their lab coats and use interactive apps with 3-D images to show patients what's going on with their bodies, said Laurance Stuntz, director of the Massachusetts eHealth Institute.
Public apps, though, have been more of a mixed bag.
The ones that provide value — such as being able to deposit a check using a smartphone photo or being able to track how far and fast you're running — have gained a loyal following, said Stuntz and Ian Finley, Gartner's vice president of research. And the potential for this technology is enormous, Kassim said, with many retailers piloting apps that would allow customers to upload shopping lists, use location-based technology to direct them to all the products on their lists, scan the items into their shopping carts and pay for everything using their smartphones.
But customers almost never keep more than 100 apps on their phone, Finley said, and will remove the ones that aren't regularly used.
That happens rather often as customers discover the app they've just downloaded offers little opportunity for interaction and appears to have been developed by its vendor to keep up with the times, said Greg Charland, president of Charland Technology, a technology services provider in Hubbardston.
“There's a lot of 'me too' going on,” Charland said. “There's a lot of companies that have apps that don't add any value.”
The biggest mistakes companies make, Finley said, is trying to turn their website into an app. Activities such as retirement planning are very popular with people sitting at home with an open laptop, he said, but are almost never undertaken by folks on the go without any access to personal files.
“You can't just take your website, drop it into an app and be successful,” Finley said.
Nonetheless, apps have really taken off over the past two years as smartphones have become more ubiquitous. Since then, the development of apps has become much faster and easier.
Mountains of tedious script have been replaced by prefabricated tools that allow for visual app construction using drag-and-drop features, Todd said. Plus, it's no longer necessary to design separate interfaces for web and mobile functionality, Charland said.
All this has cut Charland's design time for a small application down from three to four months in early 2012 to one to two months today.
Virtusa orients its mobile offerings around three platforms. Kassim said this saves both time and money, since many app components have already been tested and security kinks have already been worked out.
Roughly half of the applications requested by clients don't fit one of the company's pre-existing templates, Kassim said. But in most instances, existing platforms can be sufficiently enhanced to deliver what a customer is asking for.
Using platforms reduces app design time by two to three months compared with building from scratch, Kassim said.
More rapid design cycles have created a need for almost continuous testing, Johnston said. That's where the need emerges for a company like uTest.
Some 3,000 new contractors join uTest each month, Johnston said, and the most successful among them have been making six figures a year for several years.
“The market opportunity is there,” he said.
WBJ Web Partners
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