Sencha

Jeff Pope

Businesses today are under intense pressure to deliver highly sophisticated and long-lived web and mobile applications to the market faster than ever. Consumers of these applications are expecting to access them from their desktop, tablets and smart-phones and are demanding the same great experience across all device types.

Building an application numerous times to support different device types is too much for most organizations. In the May 2015 study commissioned by Sencha and conducted by Forrester Consulting, The Rise of Web Technology, 27 percent of surveyed organizations reported they planned to shift away from native development to web technology. The primary reason cited was the desire to improve development efficiency and the study went on to recommend that development teams “do more with less” by building apps with greater sophistication and complexity in the same amount of time.

"Building an application numerous times to support different device types is too much for most organizations."

 Web technology, HTML5, CSS and JavaScript is going mainstream. In the study cited above, 63 percent of surveyed organizations reported that web technology is critical to their web and mobile application strategies. It enables development teams to use one code base to create an application that can run on multiple device types and deliver the right experience, on the right screen, at the right time. This type of application is often referred to as a universal application.

In addition to improving development efficiency, web technology is helping organizations deliver great user experiences. Businesses can use web technology to visualize and analyze complex data through rich user interface components such as charts, grids, pivot grids, and trees and ensure that the information renders properly for the specific device type that’s being used at that specific time.

An example of an organization that’s embraced web technology is Green tree International, which is based in New Zealand and provides ERP software to more than 10,000 companies globally, across more than 20 industry verticals. Green tree knew it needed to take its Windows-based software into a new world and chose web technology to do so. The most important factors in making this transition were:

• Cross-platform: Run on as broad a range of devices and not rely on any particular operating system or browser vendor
• Performance: Perform well to provide the user with a responsive user experience
• Flexible: Deliver a rich user interface to allow for a very flexible product
• Customizable: Be able to enhance and extend the framework
• Supported: Have an active developer community with strong support forums
• Rich Library: Provide an extensive set of widgets, examples, and developer documentation.

By embracing web technology, Green tree has been able to modernize its ERP platform, accelerate release cycles, and deliver a great user experience to its customers.

Is your business thinking about making the move to web technology? Picking the right web technology platform is critical. The following are the top three most important factors to surveyed organizations in choosing a web technology provider that were reported in the aforementioned study:

1. The richness or power of the technology features
2. The overall cost of purchasing and adopting the solution
3. The quality of support the provider offers