On November 16th Scott Logic ran a technical management seminar for IT directors and CTOs from the Asset Management industry. The event was hosted by Investit at their City offices. A number of key industry players were in attendance at IT director and CTO level, including representatives from Artemis Investment Management, Baillie Gifford, Jupiter Asset Management, Martin Currie, Newton Investment Management, and Old Mutual Asset Management.

The theme of the seminar was Enterprise Mobility. Scott Logic spoke on a number of mobility related themes including: mobile technology within financial services, mobile application development using HTML5, and mobile security. Simon Foley (Head of Development, Edinburgh and Bristol) and Colin Eberhardt (Senior Technical Architect) presented on these themes and participated in a lively debate.

Scott Logic and Investit also carried out a survey of attendees on some of the key issues raised, which found that:

• A significant number plan to invest in tablet applications next year, with slightly fewer planning to invest in smartphones.
• The iPad is by far the most important tablet device, though interest in Android is greater than marketshare.
• The iPhone is the smartphone of most interest, with BlackBerry and Android also having significant levels of interest.
• Security is the biggest obstacle to smartphone and tablet usage.
• HTML5 is of significant interest, however there are still a significant number looking at native applications or undecided.