October 3, 2012
Colorado Springs, CO

With the proliferation of tablet computers, this is a question that can keep development managers up at night. In a short two years, we have moved from a single platform (PCs) and a couple of browsers to a fractured device environment that spans both type and form factor.

Tablet usage in the US today is approximately 54.8 million devices, or approximately 23% of all Internet users.

Analysts are predicting the tablet growth rate to continue or increase each year with 2011 having a 256% growth rate over 2010 and a projected total market of approximately 500 million tablets by 2015. These numbers simply underscore the importance of targeting a long term mobile strategy that can support and enhance the way business is done and not one that limits and complicates business.

Many view these mobile devices as entertainment-only focused devices with no real tangible business value. This view misses the un-tethered and connected flexibility these devices can provide to a sales force and is really more about the lack of software, which is leveraging the extreme flexibility of these devices.

The people working through the W3C on Internet standards had seen this evolution coming long before the rest of the world, and they ended up addressing it by forming a new web standard called HTML5. Well, actually this new/old standard grew from trial and error going back as far as 1998. For an interesting background, Google “the history of html5” and you will find some interesting reads.

The point is that there really is no longer a question of how to address a mobile strategy as the evolution of the Internet standards themselves have made it clear that HTML5, at this time, is the only long term approach. When researching the history of HTML5 it becomes clear that large software institutions have already made this declaration.

The real decision is how will you leverage and integrate the marketing and exposure capabilities that are so important through the online app stores with your long term HTML5 business application strategy?

To app or not to app, that is the question, and this decision is completely dependent on the situation and goals. But no longer is an application in the app-store considered a mobile strategy, it’s simply too limiting in today’s fractured and diverse end user device landscape.

At Insurance Technologies we understand the importance of mobile capabilities and we design our products using the technology that provides carriers and advisors with sustainable workflows that make conducting business in new ways better and faster. We keep carrier key considerations in mind, including but not limited to, how to showcase the strengths of their products, drive user adoption, meet regulatory requirements, streamline the sales process, and how mobile strategies will play into the overall corporate goals. We recently developed our FireLight^® platform, an e-application business fulfillment platform, with HTLML5 technology that presents the same user interface and experience across end user devices for all lines of business providing the industry a true ROI technology platform.