Data is always growing, but now the challenge is more about gaining insights from data and then making those insights usable. Mobile is one of the first places insights can become actionable. And IBM’s Mobile Enterprise Services benefits as much as its customers from making the insights its Center for Applied Insights reveals about mobile developers.

In an insightful chat, Dave Vellante, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, got the scoop from Susanne Hupfer, senior advisor for the IBM Center of Applied Insights, and Phil Buckellew, IBM’s VP of mobile enterprise, about trends in mobile and how IBM makes those insights actionable for its own business.

Mobile drives change

Vellante and Buckellew both agreed that the end-user experience, en masse, dictates the development of an application, ultimately. One particular study brought up by Hupfer of mobile developers acknowledged how important this was in application development. Successful mobile applications, of which only one-third studied, met the basic criterion of being on-time, on-budget, and on-objective. The key driver of development in two-thirds of these successful application was found to be development driven by analytics derived from its end users.

What makes a successful application?

It wasn’t only analytics-driven development that drove success for those firms but rather a few other factors too. Hupfer made note of three revealing commonalities in their success:

1. There was a strong, cohesive team with at least one mobile developer with ideally five years or more of experience.

2. The use and implementation of cloud APIs, as well as the use of a mobile application development platform. Buckellew noted that IBM’s recent cloud API announcements with Watson make it an ideal platform for placing analytics at the “touch point” right in the hands of the end-user. IBM’s mobile development platform also offers many SDKs that can perform analytics so that developers don’t even need to create their own to begin realizing business gains.

3. Collaboration between developers and other business elements was critical, as well as a look toward the end user. Firms were more successful when they had a more full view of what they were creating. This seems to lend itself to the view that analytics of the end-users was key to driving successful mobile application development.

Mobile continues to grow at IBM, and it is using its own insights to put into action ways to improve application developers experiences so it can innovate more instead of worrying about the back-end annoyances.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Insight 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE