European Consortium receives funding from the European Commission to develop mobile business applications in the cloud
The MobiCloud consortium announces today that it has just concluded negotiations with the European Commission's Directorate General for Communication Networks, Content and Technologies (DG CONNECT). The MobiCloud project will be co-funded under the Information and Communication Technologies Strategic Support Programme (SSP) and the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP), with a total budget of €4.45M.
The MobiCloud consortium is led by Appear (Sweden) and includes Nettropolis (Germany), EsperantoXL (Netherlands), Costain (UK) and COMIT Projects (UK). The aim of the project is to stimulate the deployment of new mobile services and to support the emergence of a European ecosystem of mobile developers in the cloud.
Reducing the cost and complexity of mobile application development through cloud computing technologies is a strategic objective of the European Commission. With MobiCloud it will be possible for SMEs, and not only for large software vendors, to rapidly develop mobile extensions to their existing business applications. The Commission aims to foster the adoption of cloud computing technologies in all sectors of the economy, which can reduce the technological costs of businesses, and when combined with new digital practices, can boost productivity, growth and jobs.
The MobiCloud project offers four implementations covering different industry applications (urban transport operators, railway operators, temporary staff managers and engineering and construction companies) where users equipped with smartphones or tablets can access a portfolio of mobile services hosted in the cloud. MobiCloud offers a composite screen ("mash-up") that brings together data from various IT systems. Depending on the context (location, role, skills, available colleagues, etc.), the application displays different services that react in real time to changes (tasks, incidents, alerts).
The analyst firm Gartner summarizes the challenges of business application development in its recent report "Hype Cycle for Application Development", which presents Appear (coordinator of the MobiCloud project) as a selected vendor: "Many factors, including advances in the cloud, mobility, information and social networking, are changing the way applications can be built and the value they can deliver to businesses. To remain competitive, application developers must continually adopt new technologies. »
Companies interested in joining the MobiCloud ecosystem are encouraged to sign up for the adoption pilot program where they will have access to a MobiCloud testbed to manage their own mobility projects: info@mobicloudproject.eu.