More and more companies have been jumping on the mobile device management (MDM) and enterprise mobility management (EMM) train these days — and with good reason. With 90 percent of companies encouraging BYOD (bring your own device), the market is clearly there. This is a big part of why the likes of BlackBerry and Huawei have rolled out new EMM and MDM offerings in the last month or so.

However, as it’s been pointed out before, it isn’t just mobile devices that need managing; it’s also the apps that run on those devices. This may actually be the biggest factor for companies seeking an MDM solution, as a good enterprise application development infrastructure may prevent problems down the line.

The biggest problem is ensuring support for various kinds of apps across various kinds of platforms, including native, hybrid and HTML5. HTML5 apps may often be overlooked by mobile enterprise application platforms (MEAPs) simply because native apps currently rule, but a good MEAP should consider that HTML5 may challenge this dominance in the near future.

This is the attitude Magic Software has taken with its MEAP. According to Regev Yativ, president and CEO of Magic Software Enterprises Americas, enterprises shouldn’t be forced into selecting single-environment development tools for mobile apps. Not only does this prevent the enterprise from receiving the best value, it forces the development process to go in one direction only.

With Magic’s MEAP, customers have a choice; they can develop natively, in hybrid mode — which combines the qualities of native and HTML5 apps — or strictly in HTML5. This reduces code writing by around 50 percent, thanks to precompiled components.

More importantly, it allows companies to make the investment on a MEAP today without fear of being behind the curve tomorrow by making HTML5 development easily accessible.