Yesterday Sencha announced the new version of Sencha Space 1.3 which has one, in my humble opinion, critically important additional function.

As the IoT/M2M community goes from silo solutions to common infrastructure a key ingredient is to make the applications available at all times.  This is particularly important to companies with field operations and even hospitals and other campus environments where connectivity can be an issue. 

As the company states, this “new offline functionality that empowers businesses to flexibly support diverse types of application usage. For IT teams, the offline feature enables full control over app versioning, allowing for multiple and different versions of the same application based on the user’s profile. Updates are also simplified, as Sencha Space provides HTML5 application development technology, with which IT can push application updates and edits directly to all platforms and devices, a far superior approach compared to native applications that require users to manually update application software through an app store. For end users, the new feature enables regular app usage and data storage…In an offline mode, it is then easily synced up the next time the user is connected. “

In addition, when you look at many of the existing applications, they are still delivered in a batch mode so migrating the applications to a mobile environment needs to reflect the experience of the existing users.   Sencha Space 1.3 supports a white – label client experience that allows the Enterprise IT department to support the migration to mobility without redesigning the user experience.  The result is that Enterprise systems can be as user friendly as consumer apps.

Perhaps the biggest message her is not the functionality, but the understanding that life cycle management is at the core of Enterprise Software Systems.  This issue seems to come up again and again as companies manage the any to any device world.

While app stores are the rage right now, the reality is that a consumer model for application delivery has a lot of concerns.   While web sites and web pages have a tendency to have constant updates and be dynamic, the systems being turned into applications need to have a life cycle management aspect.   So what we are seeing is a maturing of the apps marketplace where IT is now treating their HTML5 applications as add-ons and separate experiences, but as part of the standard development process.  Waterfalls or Agile (News – Alert), sprinting or milestones the Enterprise IT is looking at web apps as a core part of the business.

Sencha has given the space to succeed at it.