Lessons Learned from Mobile AppsWorld

As the Mobile AppsWorld conference came to an end yesterday what can SAP reflect on and learn from its first time sponsorship ? Was it worth it ? Do developers care about SAP ? What about the giants of mobility such as Microsoft and RIM ? In my previous blog, bit.ly/O4XwN2 , I gave a view on the first day. Now the conference is over its time to analyse what we can learn from the event.

Firstly a word about RIM.  From the amount of people around their stand I’d suggest that the claims that RIM are past it may have been over exaggerated. However, I had several conversations with people who are not considering RIM as part of their future device roadmap. Maybe the developers haven’t got that message from the business yet…

Microsoft are coming from the other side. With the release of Windows 8 nearly upon us (well maybe later in October according to Techradar) there was a lot of interest in their stand and this time in my conversations the view was a definite inclusion into enterprise mobility roadmaps. Personally I take this with a slight pinch of salt – we’ve been here before and I think the proof will be in the early take up of Windows based mobile device rather than in the current pre-release hype. Of course Microsoft are definitely still one to watch.

So what did SAP get out of the event ?

Firstly, one aim of SAP being there was to create awareness that we have an offering for mobile developers. Tick, job done. However, I think we also realise the scale of the task ahead. Many developers were surprised to see SAP there at all. But after a quick conversation we saw many “mmm, OK” looks on faces. It will be interesting to watch the rate of click-throughs on the offer of trying it out via Amazon Web Services. There is no doubt in my mind there is a fantastic enterprise opportunity for mobile developers that are in short supply.

Secondly, we wanted to present our tools and platform. As well as demonstrating a variety of our apps, on different devices, we also walked developers through the tooling side. Actually getting hands-on with the tools will help dispel some of the myths that anything SAP does is clunky and too SAP centric. My view is we need to be doing a lot more awareness to the development community. We should also include our development partners such as Sencha, Appcelerator and Adobe.

Finally, it’s worth noting we have been down the route of building a developers community before – with SAP NetWeaver –and  you are on the results of that right now ! So maybe that is something we can do well – over 2 million subscribers can’t be wrong. Access to all the wealth of resources and development tools for mobile can be found at  developers.sap.com/mobile.

So what do you think ? I’d welcome views on how the perception of SAP in the mobile development area is really faring. And what about the other vendors – who does it well, and who doesn’t ?