I've been watching SAP's acquisition of Sybase pretty closely, mostly because of their Sybase Love Fest Part 1 - Data Solutions (although everyone else is mostly excited about their mobility solutions).
What are the pieces?
Sybase has two key pieces that interest me in their mobile area.
- Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP) allows users to very easily take their existing web services and convert them into lighter/nimbler/mobile-ready services. Due soon is the ability to automatically create workflows and deploy them.
- Sybase Afaria is an MDM (Mobile Device Management - not to be confused with Master Data Management, Meta Data Management, or any of other MDMs) that allows enterprise management of mobile devices including remote wipes, application deployment, etc.
So what?
Someone in your organization is already doing something work-related on an iPad: beyond getting used to it, you need to get prepared for it. The world is going mobile, and enterprise applications are the key to actually making your employees useful in the field. While most vendors are scrambling to provide solutions, your folks want applications they can use NOW! SUP gives you a fast and easy win in terms of putting very simple workflows into the field. Regardless of whether you want to go mobile, you are going to.
More good stuff
- It doesn’t' get much easier to create a mobile app than this.
- Right now, all over the world, executives are leaving their unlocked Blackberries on a train. You need to be ready to wipe them. Afaria will help you.
- This solutions are, by all accounts, easy to install and able to run on any sort of hardware you want.
- The one thing I really like about how SAP is handling the Sybase acquisition (just like they did when they acquired BusinessObjects) is their steadfast commitment to keep it platform agnostic. In a few years I'm sure SUP will run better on SAP than on anything else. But I'm sure it will also still run magnificently on Oracle and everything else.
Gotchas
- You already need to have web services in place to make SUP-built applications super-fast to deploy.
- Full disclosure: I don't know that much about Afaria. But I'm pretty sure someone in your company needs to know about MDM, like, yesterday.
Buzzword hat tip
People don't want to work at their desk anymore, but they still need to be able to work. You have to mobilize them with actionable data, and you need to give them the ability to take action.
