Driven by the smartphone revolution, consumerisation, and the ever-expanding Cloud, the renaissance of the Application is set to hit high gear and gain serious momentum through 2010. Or should that be the renaissance of the App?

Inexplicable abbreviations, impenetrable lingo, baffling semantics, and half-baked concepts are an occupational hazard when you work in the tech business. Even these days. (See “TLA”, “Product Services”, “Ethical Hacking” et al in The New Uxbridge Concise Dictionary of Hidebound IT Weaselry).

Even the latest buzzword du jour – the seemingly innnocent ‘App’ – is a classic example of baffling semantics in disguise. Why so? App is just short for Application isn’t it? Well, no. It isn’t apparently. Well, except sometimes. And that’s exactly the problem.

The App, nod the experts sagely, is in fact a species entirely distinct from the application if not in name,
then in form and function. Apps do “a single thing well, as opposed to Applications, which are less focused”and according to Matt Brooke-Smith, founder of App-creation firm Future Workshops, this will be anincreasingly crucial distinction from here on in.

Launched in 2008 to deliver iPhone and later iPad Apps for “premium brands”, Future has already created award-winning Apps for businesses including Bauer Media (Empire Magazine, Motorcycle News), QlikTech, Airkix, Parker’s, and Agency Republic. And its founder believes that the enterprise will prove a hugely fruitful hunting ground for the App – as opposed to the application – over the next few years.

“The enterprise will start seeing the advantages of Apps in the very near future”, he comments, predicting that users will soon be building their very own sets of custom, ad hoc Apps; freeing themselves (and their developers) from the bonds of monolithic software long-running development, lack of focus on usability, poor support, over-reliance on legacy architecture – in the process.

In fact, says Bob Tinker, CEO of MobileIron, the enterprise smartphone and App-revolution is well underway already. Hold on though. While the application’s recent migration from the enterprise on to personal devices  may be regarded as a natural and perhaps inevitable evolution, its reinvention as the “App” and its push back in the other direction is surely more of a surprise.

So what’s driving it? And what does it mean for the rest of us? One major factor has been the global uptake and ongoing domination of the all-conquering smartphone, with Gartner predicting that the combined installed base of smartphones and other browser-equipped handsets will be greater than that of PCs by 2013, while Canalys reports 67% year-onyear growth in the sector.

A further key dynamic has been the accelerating push towards web-provisioning, service oriented
architectures, and utility and Cloud Computing which – along with improving middleware and bandwidth availability – is allowing allows users to move more freely between devices.

Arguably most instrumental of all however is the rapid and ongoing consumerisation of the entire
tech industry, which Patrick Irwin, product marketing manager at Citrix UK, believes is having a huge knockon effect on user expectations – and therefore on the IT organisations tasked with meeting their demands.

“With consumers seeing a proliferation of applications for every aspect of their lives, developers need to keep in mind that applications now need to work across various end-user devices”, he says. “Restricting them to one sort of PC or one operating system shows a lack of foresight – and will inevitably impact (App) adoption.”

He foresees an increase in on-demand, service-based IT delivery models in which Apps are decoupled from end-point devices; a “manage once, deliver anywhere” approach where Apps can be delivered irrespective of the device chosen by the individual. “This alleviates pressures on IT teams so they can focus on managing applications centrally rather than on each and every device, while the data remains locked away securely in the datacentre, permitting users to embrace the applications of tomorrow safely and productively.”

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