Ionic's Enterprise App Summit 2021 Recap

The Enterprise App Summit—a yearly event bringing together enterprise tech leaders from across various industries—gathered attendees from different companies around the world on December 8 to learn from and engage with expert panelists from enterprises including Amazon, Volkswagen, and T-Mobile.

In case you missed the event, here is a summary of the day's events with links to each talk to watch (and rewatch) at your convenience.

Enterprise App Summit 2021 keynote

Ionic Co-founder and CEO Max Lynch delivered the opening keynote to kick off the summit. He shared Ionic’s vision of how enterprise app development will look in the future. He discussed the importance of developers to produce the best apps for enterprises, how the Web is the only safe bet in app development, and why traditional open source software can actually be a hindrance to enterprises. 

Ionic product vision

At the summit, viewers were given a high-level overview of how we see Ionic evolving in the future. Ionic is shifting from a piecemeal, independent component-based experience to a cohesive, single platform experience that gives you everything you need to build, secure, and deliver the apps that power your business. 

What Ionic added to the platform in 2021 

In his keynote, Max listed some of the newest additions to the Ionic suite of products and solutions. Read his 2021 year-end review to get a full list of updates.

Capacitor 3: Launched to turn more web developers into mobile developers by enabling them to build apps with their favorite web stack.

Ionic Portals: Developed to help native teams scale their mobile projects by more easily embedding quality web experiences

Ionic 6: Updated with tons of new components and design updates for beautiful cross-platform apps with Angular, React, and Vue.

New CLI for Ionic Appflow: Created to enable integrating popular enterprise CI/CD platforms such as Azure DevOps, Jenkins, and GitLab with Appflow’s Mobile CI/CD features.

Zebra DataWedge support: For enterprises building apps that integrate with Zebra scanners and mobile devices

Microsoft Intune support: For integration with the Intune App SDK and the Microsoft Authentication Library (MSAL) for powerful auth flows and security compliance.

Ionic Payments: With support for Apple Pay and Google Pay for easy payment experiences.

Windows desktop support: Our Premier integration with Windows provides a native Windows platform using modern Windows development SDKs to enable teams to target Windows 10 and beyond with access to native Windows APIs.

Watch the full keynote to learn more.

Micro experience and micro frontends

We heard three different sessions covering micro services and micro frontends. Enterprise app development is moving from large, monolithic architecture to segmented, reusable code that can be inserted into any large application. This drives app speed to market, cross-collaboration, and improved performance. 

Michel Tobon, senior front-end engineer at Amazon, explored multiple ways in which enterprises can leverage micro-frontend architecture and web components compiled by Stencil in order to simplify the development, deployment, and consumption of third party content into large front-end applications.

Robert Flagg, director of engineering at Modus Create, shared how micro-frontends can impact cost, delivery cadence, and operational efficiencies. He also provided real examples of several enterprises that have achieved success with a micro-frontend architecture.

Matt Netkow, head of product marketing at Ionic, shared how using Ionic Portals will allow enterprise development teams to deliver micro experiences on mobile apps.

Design systems

Another big theme covered at the summit involved design systems and the importance of reusable component libraries for delivering consistent user experiences at scale. 

Thorsten Jankowski, UX lead and product owner at Volkswagen AG, Matthias Fritsch, design lead at MAN Truck & Bus SE, and Volkswagen software engineers Jan Vornkahl and Johannes Bosch shared how they enable collaboration between teams across a multi-brand environment to deliver a seamless experience from figma and sketch to web components built with Stencil—Ionic’s toolchain for building reusable, scalable design systems.

Internet of things and connected devices

Speakers shared how they are leveraging Ionic solutions to build IoT and connected device capabilities.

Brandon Bakke, solution architect at Doosan Bobcat, discussed the thought process behind choosing Ionic as the tech stack to use for their newest app: Bobcat Machine IQ. Machine IQ is a digital telematics system that helps Bobcat equipment owners access machine info in real time from any location or device. Owners can check the health, maintenance, security, and performance of each connected machine at any time.

Ionic 6

During the summit, we announced the launch of Ionic 6. Liam DeBeasi, Ionic’s software developer and Ionic 6 project lead, dove into the decisions made to develop these features, specific framework version requirements, issues addressed with the new updates, and what’s coming next after Ionic 6.

Additional sessions lead by industry experts

Throughout the day, speakers across various industries shared priceless knowledge about different aspects of mobile app development.

Thomas Ingoglia, director of enterprise architecture at US Foods, guided us end-to-end through a modern microservices architecture, and discussed the design that enables a modern user experience along with the technology and tools behind it. 

Stanci Soderstrom, manager of learning technology strategy at T-Mobile, and Eric Madsen, learning technology architect at T-Mobile, described the team’s planning process to build a You Tube-like internal media platform, why they chose to build with Ionic, the challenges they've faced along the way, and why they would want to create such an app in the first place.

Daniel Rodriguez, lead mobile developer at Norwex, and Rob Gore, director of mobile applications at Norwex, walked us through how Norwex’s technical leaders chose Ionic solutions, leaned on Ionic’s world-class support and advisory team, and engaged with the Ionic community to quickly deliver their mission-critical applications to a global audience.

Jedidiah Weller, CEO & software guru at OpenForge, and OpenForge software engineers María José Méndez and Fernando Del Olmo discussed the businesses benefit, technology benefits, performance improvement when choosing to build their applications with mono repositories. They also presented real strategies and exact implementations for converting your current team into a monorepo team.

Ralph Borges, mobile product manager at AAA, and Sesha Sai Ram Peteti, product manager for ACG Group at AAA shared how AAA achieves a balance of unique customer experience and app parity across unique app experiences in different regions by reusing architecture, leveraging CI/CD pipelines to deliver a seamless user flow, and maintaining brand continuity with a centralized design system.

The Enterprise App Summit App

For the first time, we developed and launched a new mobile application for the Enterprise App Summit.

Built with Ionic technology including Live Updates, Capacitor, and Ionic’s own UI framework, Ionic 6, this app is designed to be updated quickly to bring the latest information to event participants, and provide a seamless experience across any device. 

The app was co-created by Matt Netkow, Liam DeBeasi, and Ben Sperry. In a fireside chat at the summit, Matt Netkow, head of product marketing at Ionic, and Matt Kremer, director of product at Ionic, discussed the app development process.

Looking to the new year

Though we just finished the Enterprise App Summit, we are well on our way to planning a new set of events in the coming year. Be on the lookout for our launch event at the beginning of the year, Ioniconf 2022, and our third annual Enterprise App Summit!

About Ionic

Ionic is a leader in enterprise mobile app development, with 5 million developers worldwide. It powers 15% of apps in the app store, not including thousands of apps built internally at enterprises for every line-of-business need. Ionic is unique in that it takes a web-first approach, leveraging HTML, CSS, and Javascript to build high-quality iOS, Android, desktop, and Progressive Web Apps.