IDC Viewpoint: SAP and Sybase Launch "SAP Store for Mobile Apps" at SAPPHIRE NOW and SAP TechEd Madrid
By Nicholas McQuire, Research Director, Enterprise Mobility Strategies EMEA, IDC
(PresseBox) - At last week's co-located SAPPHIRE NOW and TechEd in Madrid, SAP unveiled its next wave of mobile enterprise applications as part of its emphatic push into enterprise mobility since the $5.8bn acquisition of Sybase in May 2010. At the event, SAP launched the "SAP Store for Mobile Apps" (SSMA), an "enterprise ready" app store consisting of a suite mobile business apps by SAP and certified mobile apps from SAP's partner ecosystem. The apps range from business process and task-specific mobile solutions to more light-weight horizontal workflow apps geared around specific functional roles or mobile worker groups within the enterprise. Continuing the momentum from earlier this year at SAPPHIRE NOW USA when it launched 19 mobile apps as part release 2.0 of Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP), its next generation mobile enterprise application platform (see IDC Link "SAP to Launch 50 Mobile Applications by Year-End Running on Sybase's Unwired Platform (SUP)"), SAP highlighted a greater number of apps across verticals such as Healthcare & Public Sector, Banking, Retail, Service, Manufacturing, Oil and Gas and Consumer Packaged Goods. Specific functional mobile apps demonstrated included:
- Field Service and Enterprise Asset Management
- Sales Force Automation
- Business Intelligence and Analytics
- HR
- Finance and Procurement
SSMA mobile apps are currently available for iOS devices on Apple's App Store as "SAP Mobile Apps". Android and RIM compatible versions will follow later this year according to the firm.
Ecosystems and "Mobile-First Thinking" Starting to Pay Off
It's no secret SAP is placing big bets on mobility alongside cloud and in-memory computing as the next wave of growth and innovation for the firm. On the mobility panel at the show, SAP co-CEO Jim Snabe stated his belief that all future apps will be designed "mobile first, desktop second" and that "mobile-first thinking" is a mindset shift the company is actively adopting. One manifestation of this highlighted at the event was a mobile healthcare electronic medical record (EMR) app deployed by customer Charite Hospital. According to Snabe, SAP employees lived onsite at the hospital for two weeks to work with physicians directly to design the app, gain user buy-in and drive utilization. In over a year, SAP has built 30+ mobile apps directly and gone a good distance in extending its Business Software Suite with SUP. Snabe also noted that over ?80m in revenue has been derived from mobility solutions this year and the firm is on target to hit ?100m by year end 2011.
But while SAP rushes to optimize and enhance its software portfolio to the pace and simplicity of design that mobility requires, or as Snabe put it: "Apple simple at Google speed", the firm stressed that its core mission in enterprise mobility is to draw and support an ecosystem of app development around Afaria and SUP rather than drive app development itself. This ecosystem play is new to the nascent MEAP segment and few MEAP players have the ability to reach and incent enterprise mobile app developers at scale to write to a single mobile middleware platform. SAP has over 1000+ partners in its core ecosystem (via its EcoHub and other channels) and has over 50 mobile apps from SAP and certified apps from its ecosystem partners already in SSMA with over 200 in the certification pipeline according to the firm. The mobile partner apps are offered by Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Systems Integrators (SIs) including CSC, HCL AXON and Mahindra Satyam for example. This strategy is expected to yield "thousands of mobile apps within the next few years", 80% of which will come from partners writing to the SUP SDK. Whilst SAP will continue to develop apps on SUP across the evolving SAP environment, the main priority will be to iterative and improve SUP's APIs and SDKs to keep partners engaged and innovating and certified apps flowing into SSMA, for which it will take a 15% share of revenue.
A Promising Start With Some Limitations However...
IDC has long argued that SAP's acquisition of Sybase 18 months ago was perhaps the most significant development in the worldwide MEAP market because it was a frank admission from a key enterprise software player that the mobile enterprise was indeed a critical trend to be taken seriously. And despite initial reservations around integration challenges and cultural fit between the firms at the time of acquisition, the arrival of SSMA at SAPPHIRE NOW is a clear sign that both SAP and Sybase are continuing to execute on their stated commitments. It is only a start however, and both firms will need to address some limitations over the next 12 months. These include:
1. Afaria Improvements & Deeper Integration: Afaria, Sybase's mobile device and application management solution, has been criticized in the past for its heavy-lifting and slow time to market vs. competitor MDM solutions. During the week of SAPPHIRE NOW Sybase announced the latest release of Afaria which carries enhanced application on-boarding, expense management and critically, accelerated installation capabilities. Whilst Afaria provides key management and security components such as provisioning, single sign-on for SAP back-ends, encryption and a central enterprise management portal, at launch, SSMA lacked crucial app management features such as the ability to distribute and manage apps by role or implement layered security policies around SSMA apps within Afaria. Additionally, Afaria users could not yet launch SSMA within the MDM client on the device. The firm expects these key features to go live within a few weeks however.
2. Sybase 365 and SAP Analytics: Another opportunity for Sybase, particularly in one of its core verticals - Banking - is that its mobile commerce and m-banking capabilities, including couponing, mobile wallet and m-payments, under the Sybase 365 business unit, that co-exist with SUP today could be brought more tightly together for customers. Financial firms in particular, creating b2b2c apps with transaction capabilities alongside their b2e projects would benefit greatly from this capability. Additionally, SAP's analytics suite - Business Objects - is not yet fully leveraged within the platform as well. Dr. Raj Nathan, executive vice president, Sybase, and head of Mobile Applications for SAP told IDC in an exclusive 1-1 in Madrid that Sybase plans to merge its customer-facing and employee-facing app development teams and develop deeper integration on the analytics and select m-commerce sides in the coming 12 months.
3. Non-SAP or SAP Ecosystem Applications: SSMA is largely a SAP and SAP ecosystem play, in that it only supports applications written on the SUP SDK or gateways to SAP server applications. General 3rd party productivity or business applications outside of these contexts are not yet supported.
4. Android: Whilst Sybase recently released a HTML5-based hybrid web container solution that supports Android devices amongst other platforms, device support for SSMA mobile apps is largely confined to iOS devices with many individual SSMA apps available on the RIM platform as well. Android will be supported for all SUP-based applications in Q4 2011 according to the firm.
5. Pricing: An undiscussed aspect of SAP's mobility strategy is pricing. The commercial heterogeneity of SAP's mobility components has high potential for complexity, on the surface at least. Price permutations include Business Suite licenses, mobile app extensions to Business Suite, SUP licenses - either fixed price or subscription based, Afaria module costs and SAP Gateway fees (for mobile app extensions independent of SUP). SAP will need to delicately balance the impulse to monetize as many of the components as possible with the customer requirement for price simplicity and the strategic goal of getting a high penetration of the platform in the enterprise as quickly as possible.
Final Word
Vendors all shapes and sizes are starting to take to market their own "enterprise app stores" intent on providing a blend of the features in consumer-oriented app stores (browsing and discovery, instant purchasing and download) with those required by enterprise users such as flexible payments, volume discounts, certification, customer support, security and policy-based distribution and management. However, without scale or an ecosystem behind them, most of these vendors, be it MDM or MEAP firms, concentrate innovation cycles on specific mobility component areas such as mobile app development and testing or application management and security environments for instance.
SAP and Sybase stand unique in having the ability to bring most aspects of mobilization together for a customer - integrated mobile security and management, development and testing frameworks, an application ecosystem and the core back-end business software, in memory computing and analytics capabilities. And whilst these assets combined bring a potential for price complexity, vendor lock-in and some limitations discussed above, crucially, SAP is now moving at 3- to 6-month development cycles (unheard of 24 months ago for a company of this size), necessary for mobility innovation and to address its limitations. In the end, customers and execution will decide, but it is clear from SAPPHIRE NOW that SAP and Sybase have made substantial progress in enterprise mobility in the past 12 months. Much will be revealed in the coming 12 months as well as de-facto leaders emerge in this nascent but critical market.
Datum: 15.11.2011 - 11:14 Uhr
Sprache: Deutsch
News-ID 87823
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