Each and every warehouse application that you migrate brings an opportunity to improve upon or transform its user experience; regardless of which OS (or OSes) you decide to support and subsequently migrate your applications to.

While mobile initiatives are a key priority, it is important to recognize that developers on staff typically do not have the luxury of devoting all of their time to developing just mobile applications. Additionally, mobilizing and integrating manual business processes and workflows using modern mobile development platforms and tools is not only complex but can also be costly, as many legacy applications used in warehouse deployments are not being abandoned and new mobile applications require a high degree of specialized skills.

Migrating your legacy application will require a significant amount of work and resources; your organization will quickly discover that designing, developing, integrating, managing, and maintaining said applications remains a significant task (depending on your talent/staffing, and your device landscape).

Unfortunately, creating new mobile applications that are properly integrated with your legacy systems requires both a high degree of specialized skills and additional software. One of the most complex elements of modernizing and migrating aging/legacy mobile applications typically surround the manual nature of the integration work, which frequently involves time-intensive and costly manual coding. Many large enterprises have traditionally supported this through internal teams and are now sitting on often millions of lines of custom code with no clear documentation that ultimately needs recoding to leverage next generation platforms.

Read VDC Research's full report on Taking Advantage of Apps and App Modernization in Warehousing.