Ans: Developing applications for Mobile platforms is very challenging – one needs to be aware of the form-factor (screen size, keyboard constraints), processor speed and memory constraints. Though the smartphone market is growing rapidly, it still falls short of today’s PCs. Further, new handsets are released in the market every quarter.

This requires that the applications developed for certain platforms/handsets have to be ported and tested on the new handsets. Application development and test frameworks are, therefore, critical to ensure rapid development time and ensure application stability. This helps our customers get their well-tested applications to the market faster.

Q4) Please provide more insight into the CoE set up by you in terms of activities involved, upcoming R&D initiatives, team size and so on?

Ans: We have set up a CoE for Apple iPhone and Android. The CoE, includes a fully equipped lab facility, ready-to-use, re-useable building blocks that save 20-40 percent of development efforts and solution accelerators to reduce time-to-market. Our team of engineers has already created automation tools and frameworks that accelerate development, porting, interoperability testing and certification of mobile applications. One recent offering that we have developed is the porting of a VoIP based solution on multiple platforms (including Android) supported on various form-factors such as cellphones, tablets, desk-phones etc. Currently, more than 350+ engineers work exclusively on a variety of mobile platforms to develop over 50 product releases per year for carrier-grade and enterprise class applications.

Q5) What does your STAMP offering has in store?           

Ans: SmarTphone Application Mobility Platform (STAMP), a mobility framework for developing rich and user-friendly mobile applications for JAVA-enabled phones. Persistent’s STAMP framework enables faster end-to-end mobile application development ensuring optimized performance, consistent user experience and exceptional quality. J2ME is the most ubiquitous mobile application platform available today. By leveraging J2ME common features into its own development framework, STAMP offers an innovative approach to help mobile ISV’s save up to 60% on development efforts. With over 18 months of development behind it, the STAMP framework enables rapid porting to new devices, allowing developers to easily cover a wide range of J2ME-based phones and Smartphone’s.

Persistent’s mobility practice has considerable experience in developing native applications using the STAMP framework. Key STAMP benefits include:

- Faster time to market - reusable components - save up to 60% of engineering efforts.