The Perfect Guide to Enterprise App Development

The essence of mobility and flexibility in the day-to-day workflow of an organization has been well-realized by global businesses, which is why enterprise apps have got so much recognition across the globe. However, developing an enterprise app is a time-taking endeavor, best delegated to a professional or an experienced enterprise app development company.

This post offers a comprehensive guide on how to approach this critical aspect to get desired results and ensure that your investments in the project don’t go futile in any case.

Table of Contents
A Brief About Enterprise Software Market
Types of Enterprise Applications
Marketing Automation
Enterprise Resource Planning
Customer Relationship Management
Automated Billing System
Messaging & Collaboration
Business Intelligence
Steps Involved in Enterprise App Development
Be specific with Your Objectives
Choose a Trusted Enterprise App Development Company
Getting Started with the Development Phase
Cost to Develop an Enterprise App
Critical Tips to Consider
Don’t Rely on Built-in Security Features Completely
Performance Tracking & Management Capabilities
Choosing Cloud Services
App Training
Endnote

A Brief About Enterprise Software Market

IT spending on enterprise software has constantly evolved after the Pandemic and businesses are making heavy investments to streamline their business processes and integrate multiple aspects into a single database. The enterprise application software market reached USD 241 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach USD 334 billion by 2025 (Source).

Salesforce, Oracle, and IBM remain the key players in enterprise software & programming. There has been year-on-year growth of 10% in the global enterprise software market as more organizations are looking forward to addressing the efficiency of their core business processes.

Types of Enterprise Applications

Enterprise application development covers a wide range of business solutions that you can choose among. Depending on your business requirements, you can choose an apt model for your organization.

Marketing Automation

This software mainly deals with the automation of marketing workflow to avoid repetitiveness and bring efficiency to the process for enhanced sales. The prime objective is to manage and control lead generation, relationship marketing, and ROI measurement.

Enterprise Resource Planning

It is a suite of applications with a dedicated database offering cross-department visibility into different business processes, including human resources, accounting, supply chain, and many more.

Customer Relationship Management

The software consolidates different data sets allowing entrepreneurs to manage interactions and relationships with clients and customers.

Automated Billing System

These apps allow businesses to automate functions like invoicing, dunning, and collection of payments. You can also integrate such apps with ERP, CRM, and multiple payment gateways.

Messaging & Collaboration

These apps help businesses to collaborate team work efficiently, create automated email systems, and even integrate customer support to ensure brand loyalty.

Business Intelligence

The prime objective of this software is to optimize performance and decision-making processes by using the available data sensibly. It offers some smart tools to facilitate informed decisions with the help of reports, graphs, charts, and summaries.

Steps Involved in Enterprise App Development

Now that you know the different types of enterprise apps you can develop, here are the steps you must follow while approaching the project.

1. Be Specific to Your Objectives

Whatever type of enterprise app you choose to develop, decide your priorities as precisely as you can and involve your key decision-makers in it. The app must add value to your core business functionalities, and creating a detailed plan will help you identify the tools, languages, and platforms that best fit your business requirements.

2. Choose a Trusted Enterprise App Development Company

To digitize your ideas and objectives, you will need an expert agency that can code your ideas perfectly into a comprehensive software or application. Ask your enterprise app development company to prepare an MVP first. This will give you a good idea about the major pitfalls and take advantage of the feedback and evaluations. This will help you to launch your product in the quickest turnaround time and dramatically cut development costs.

Be specific with the type of custom functionalities that you want and choose the best suitable tech stack accordingly. Focus on the user experience to ensure efficiency and consider how users interact. To approach the best agency, you can use your IT contacts or take help from the internet. Check their portfolio & testimonials, and cross-check their authenticity with some rating agencies like Clutch and TopDevelopers.

3. Getting Started with the Development Phase

Make sure that you hire a team that has good experience in enterprise app development and has senior developers in it. Ask for regular reporting and communication so that you can keep a check on every smallest accomplishment. The team must follow an agile approach toward your project and ask them to keep testing elements as they proceed with the development phase.

Testing is time-taking, and developers may want to overlook this aspect, but you must ensure that they follow the testing regime stringently.

Here are three critical aspects that you must prioritize while testing:

• Storage
• Compatibility
• Scalability
• Security
• User Experience
• Connectivity & Real-time Analytics

4. Cost to Develop an Enterprise App

Developing an enterprise app is a matter of preferences and uniqueness in business processes. Hence, the cost will also depend on the level of customization and the project’s scope.

Here are some critical factors that have a major impact on development costs:

• Number of features and type of functionalities
• Location and type of development agency
• Size of the team hired
• The type of app that you want
• The kind of tech stack (Framework and integration of technologies like AI, ML, AR/VR, & Blockchain)
• The complexity involved in the project.

Hence, you must have realized that telling a definite cost for an enterprise app will be like shooting in the dark.

5. Critical Tips to Consider

The prime objective of developing an enterprise app is to align business processes and bring transparency and efficiency into them. You need to be very specific regarding each aspect of enterprise app development. Here are some critical tips that you must consider:

6. Don’t Rely on Built-in Security Features Completely

The security of an enterprise app keeps immense importance with growing cyberattacks. Hence, you must ask your mobile app developers to incorporate additional security features and multiple-level authentication. Ask them to make proper provisions for the encryption of the data during transmission.

7. Performance Tracking & Management Capabilities

Once your enterprise app is launched, you need to track its performance and make sure that you are getting desired results out of it.
Moreover, you will also need to manage the entire app effectively. Hence, ask the team to provide state-of-the-art management tools in the app.

8. Choosing Cloud Services

Using cloud services like AWS or Azure, you can ensure high-level flexibility in deploying, developing, and operating your app. These services come with a wide range of tools to support the development workflow, irrespective of the type of app being developed.

9. App Training

To develop an app for enterprise operations, you must also consider its training aspect. Your employees may take much time to get used to a fully featured and complex app. Hence, you must ask your development team to incorporate a tutorial for training your employees. To ensure that your employees take full advantage of the app leveraging its fullest potential, you must also think of some formal training sessions.

10. Endnote

Although you will encounter several challenges during the enterprise app development process, keeping this crucial information in mind will eliminate most of them. The rest depends much on the experience and expertise of the type of development agency that you choose. Just make sure that you have your best team to work out on details and adopt a minimalistic approach rather than making it too complex right from the beginning.