This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project should offer a radically new alternative to enterprises for application mobilization. The key value proposition is the ability for companies to mobilize their applications at a fraction of the cost and time as compared to any competitive offering. From a technology standpoint, the project consists of a cloud-based backend that allows for the original PC version (browser-based or thick-client-based) of enterprise applications to be run, a front-end app that runs on the mobile devices, and a purpose-built remote computing protocol called MORPH. The protocol is specifically designed to dynamically transform the application views in a manner that make them appropriate for smartphones and tablets. The platform enables mobilization without requiring any software development, mobilizes applications instantaneously, offers a unified mobilization platform for all of an enterprise's applications, and enables feature parity controllable by the enterprise. MORPH composes of two underlying technologies: 1) virtual view that virtualizes application views independent of the UI framework used into a set of UI elements and attributes that can be easily manipulated, and 2) transformation services that can be programmed onto the StarMobile platform to operate on the virtual view to realize a mobile device friendly view.
The broader / commercial impact of this project is that a company can take any current enterprise applications and extend them to users on any mobile devices at 5% to 20% of the cost and time of any other solution on the market today. This should benefit the 85% of enterprise knowledge workers who are expected to have smartphones within the next few years. A recent survey of CIOs revealed that there are multiple drivers for application mobilization - the key ones being increased productivity of employees, higher revenue, and reduced paper work. Over 90% of IT managers in a recent survey indicated plans for application mobilization. Typical customers for StarMobile include Global 2000 businesses that use on-premise, web-based and / or cloud-based applications, packaged or bespoke, to support their business processes. While there is an urgent demand for application mobilization, there are no reliable, cost-effective solutions that can perform mobilization rapidly. Thus, there is a need for a solution that can achieve rapid mobilization with minimal effort on the part of the enterprise and at the same time provide the rich set of functionality that is required.
