Enterprise application development addresses the specific requirement of business by customising apps

Modern businesses are entering an age of digital transformation with data as its core component. When organisations get excessive data, the only way they make use of it is to analyse and get insights. The data gathered can be turned into useful information only when it is unlocked with applications. This drives the companies to adopt the new approach of Enterprise Application Development.

What is Enterprise Application Development?

Enterprise application development is the complex process of creating a customised application for business purposes. The enterprise application addresses the specific requirements of the company to drive efficiency, streamline operations and better engage their employees. These applications can be deployed on the cloud, and also in a variety of platforms both on the internet and intranet. Businesses of all range from medium to large enterprises, local, state or federal government bodies, non-profit organisations, etc. are availing the feature to get a personalised working experience. Enterprise applications encode business policies, processes, rules and entities and are developed with specific business requirements in mind. These applications also have special tools to cater unique enterprise needs.

Businesses started following the enterprise application development models recently. Earlier, enterprises developed applications with the help of internal business teams and external IT teams. These customised applications teams understand the purpose they need to address by developing a solution. Hence, personalised applications focus on the enterprise's own set of needs. Companies used internal teams to know where they lack behind or where they need immediate deployment of a solution to design an application.

Mostly, the applications were deployed for the advantage of large teams of in-house resources, using a lengthy, rigid waterfall process. Traditional application development methodologies and tools were unable to fulfil the demands of modern enterprise applications. Remarkably, these enterprise applications were difficult and expensive to develop at the initial stage. A report unravels that over 76% of IT professionals say it takes an average of at least three months to develop an application. The IT teams should manage build-in infrastructure, and ensure uptime, availability, security and scalability for every application, making the process far more complicated. This was due to the limitation of technologies. But today, technology has expanded in an unexpected way mitigating a lot of enterprise issues. As the technology evolved, businesses are looking for advanced tools, applications and software to bridge the gap.

Factors to consider while choosing enterprise application development 

Tools: Internal tools play a critical role when it comes to developing an enterprise application. Speed is the core of any application in business. Enterprise application tools should ensure that the app offers a variety of time-saving features such as visual prototyping, model-driven development of business logic, APIs to integrate apps with data, etc.

Security: Businesses in the modern era reap success by leveraging consumer data. Custom application of a company also relies heavily on the gathered consumer information. These data are extremely important and should be encrypted in a safe form. Enterprise application tools should reassure that they protect all the customer information with specific built-in security measures.

Scalability: Businesses are something that can be compressed to a certain level. They grow drastically over time. Henceforth, the enterprise applications tools should have the feature to scale-up when necessary. Internet of Things (IoT) will help the company grow, and other tools can also be used to make the company viable for expanding.

Enterprise application development challenges

There is no assurance that businesses go on a straight line. Customer preference keeps changing over time and companies might also change their way of functioning based on emerging needs. This leads to the sudden requirement of suitable enterprise applications. This issue can be solved with advanced enterprise application tools that figure out the similarities and conditions. Then it makes a customised application based on the result.

Another challenging task in a business environment is to streamline data from multiple IT systems to different functions, departments and stages in a single pipeline. This poses a threat to application development. Henceforth, enterprises should use a standard data model to successfully integrate these diverse datasets. It will be easy for application developers to find the requirement when the data comes from a monopoly.