As businesses embrace mobile, the barriers between internal and external are becoming blurred, and “need to be thought of as a continuum, rather than inside and outside”, Chet Kapoor, CEO of Apigee, said.

Speaking in a keynote session at Mobile World Congress, he said: “We find that businesses want to go off and innovate around mobile for one of three reasons. They want to go off and get more efficient by using mobile applications internally, for their own productivity; to collaborate with partners in a B2B scenario; and then they want to innovate through the long-tail, actually want to create some kind of open-garden, they don’t know how, but they generally want innovation to happen.”

While these are three distinct aims, they all form part of the same equation, the executive argued.

“Wherever they start from, we find that businesses end up doing all three of those. And to do that, you need to have one strategy, not three strategies. Obviously with different controls, but you have to have one strategy as you go forward,” Kapoor noted.