IBM Worklight Gets The Magic Quadrant Treatment

September 22, 2014 Dan Burger

Gaining a favorable place on Gartner‘s Magic Quadrant is as good a reason as any to bake a cake and have a party.

IBM‘s Worklight application development portfolio an amalgamation of developer tools for creating, deploying, managing, and securing mobile applications was recently judged worthy of Magic Quadrant “Leader” status after an assessment with other selected tools.

Worklight is the mobile application development platform component of IBM’s MobileFirst enterprise mobility program. The Worklight platform includes analytics, testing, integration, security and management. IBM built Worklight to create hybrid apps, but it’s also a capable tool for building Web apps and native code and leveraging the Worklight server on the back end for integration, security, and management. Programmers adept at JavaScript can develop applications and non-programmers have access to a graphical drag-and-drop editor to create their own apps. IBM allows free availability of Worklight IDE and tools (downloadable), but charges for apps deployed into production. There are separate licensing models for consumer- and employee-facing applications.

For IT Jungle readers using the latest version of Rational Developer for IBM i, you’ll find Worklight Studio, but it is available in Java and EGL editions only. Worklight Studio, which contains server, runtime, and console components, can be used to build multi-tier, hybrid mobile applications that can integrate with backend applications running on IBM i.

The components of Worklight.

In making the grade with Gartner analysts, a mobile application development platform has to gain approval in multiple areas that include cross-platform development, deployment and management across the full life cycle, vision of the multichannel enterprise, support for multiple architectures and standards, solid understanding of IT requirements, and scalable channels and partnerships.

And that’s just the half of it.

According to Gartner rules, software vendors don’t get into the news-making leader category unless they provide platforms that are easy to purchase, program, deploy and upgrade, and connect to back-end and cloud services from the same vendor as well as third-party vendors.

IBM is not the only vendor wearing the emperor’s robes. Joining Big Blue in the leader field are SAP, Kony, Adobe, Appcelerator, and Pegasystems.

By Gartner’s reckoning, Salesforce and Microstrategy are “challengers” and the “niche players” are Apple, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, DSI, Motorola Solutions, Embarcadero , Verivo Software, and ClickSoftware. Gartner designated Xamarin, Terelik and Sencha as “visionaries.”

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant scoreboard for mobile application development platforms.

Gartner’s summation of IBM’s efforts in the mobile application development platform arena makes note of the recent agreement with Apple to jointly develop customizable mobile apps, IBM’s emphasis on analytical capabilities, and a pricing model that includes both component-based and user-based pricing. It gave the Gartner stamp of approval to IBM’s hybrid app strategy for integrating well in multi-device deployments and for choosing to work with open technologies such as Eclipse, HTML5, and JavaScript.