Client Profile

Global investment bank.

Project

Our client required an independent partner to advise them on mobile development strategy and technology selection

Business Drivers

Pressure from our client’s customers drove the need to provide research content on mobile devices.

Achievements

The client was able to decide on future strategy and platforms leading to an iPhone app to meet short-term requirements and a cross-platform app in the longer-term.

Team

The advisory team consisted of Scott Logic consultants with expertise in the mobile application space.

Work undertaken by Scott Logic

Scott Logic wrote a detailed report for the client providing a high-level analysis of the use of mobile devices as a distribution channel for research to internal and external clients. This included:

• A brief analysis of the current client research IT infrastructure as applied to mobile content.
• A comparison between writing applications for mobile and for desktop.
• An overview of each of the major mobile platforms: Google’s Android, Apple’s iOS, Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 and RIM’s Blackberry Enterprise.

This overview covered strengths and weaknesses (e.g. multitasking capability), development tool support and browser support, an overview of the available development technologies and a comparison between writing web based applications and native applications.

In order to illustrate some of the ideas presented in the report, Scott Logic created a simple HTML5 based prototype research application which could work across a number of mobile platforms. This offered basic content viewing in a browser component and the ability to work offline by managing content in the application cache.