Today SAP announced the industry’s first unified mobile application development platform: SAP Mobile Platform 3.0 – or short SMP3.

Launch Details and Links

The official press release was published in the Wallstreet Journal. The launch was covered in PCworld as well as InsideSAP and SMP3 was discussed by Franz Faerber in Vishal Sikka‘s SAP TechEd keynote (minute 54:12 onwards). Anthony Reynolds, SVP for Mobility at SAP celebrated SMP3 in his blog SAP Mobile Platform 3.0: A Promise for a More Mobile Future

The official SMP3 website is: http://www.sapmobile-platform.com.

Furthermore, we announced the Game On mobile app challenge on SMP3 with a chance to win NFL Super Bowl tickets.

SMP3 Intro

When I joined the product management team, I had the vision of SAP becoming the “Apple of the Enterprise“. With the release of SMP on HANA cloud in March 2013 we made the first step in that direction. With today’s launch of SMP3, we hit another major milestone!

Unified and open

SMP3 unifies Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP), Sybase Mobiliser, Syclo Agentry and SAP’s mobile best practices. SMP3 has a fully functional Gateway Java inside and a JAVA based version of SAP Process Integration (PI) for data integration from various different systems. With SMP3 we opened up the mobile platform and embraced open standards such as

• HTML5
• HTTP REST
• OData – http://www.odata.org
• Cordova – http://cordova.apache.org
• OSGi – http://www.osgi.org/

Value of SMP3

SMP3 adds great capabilities and features for mobile developers and administrators, such as:

• seamless online/offline experience with offline OData
• Push notifications
• B2C frameworks and app services such as payments, loyalty, couponing
• Extensibility framework for Agentry apps using native UI elements
• 3rd party data integration services with SAP Process Integration / HANA cloud integration
• Kapsel – plugins into Cordova’s container to deploy HTML5 applications (more info in John Wargo‘s blog)
• secure access to your enterprise data from the open internet
• application usage reporting
• simple HTML5 based, application-centric Admin UI (aligned with our SMP cloud release)

This rich feature set allows you to develop and run mobile applications on top of SMP3 much faster and at a lower cost.

In addition, SMP3 “layers” the value of these features on top of applications that you have built already against NetWeaver Gateway or directly against HANA – both of which use the same OData standard for their models:

SMP3 in action

Before the release of SMP3 we actually worked together with various customers and partners to validate the software.

Performance paper

To prove out that SMP3 scales we teamed up with Intel and put SMP3 to the test. The result of these tests are published on Intel’s website. In summary we found:

• The end user impact of SMP3 is less than the blink of an eye
• Simulated 5,000 requests per second. If a user makes 2 requests per minute this is equivalent to 150,000 concurrent users on SMP3
• SMP3’s processor utilization scales linearly for a variety of requests

SMP3 hands-on training

Before we launched SMP3 we host hands-on workshops in North America, EMEA and APJ to ensure our customers and partners are fully enabled to be successful. We also had a full day session at SAP TechEd in Las Vegas on SMP3. Here are some of the SMP3 quotes from the customers and partners that attended these sessions:

“simple installation, simple administration”

“Complete platform for enterprise mobility.”

“more intuitive/robust than previous versions”

“Step in the right direction”

“Good that platform is being consolidated. Easy config.”

“Can get up and running quickly”

“Huge improvements over 2.1.3”

Customer Validation

Even before the software goes into Ramp-Up, we gave SMP3 to 10 customers to validate it. The feedback so far has been great: we got our customers to install the software quickly and many of them had their first apps going on SMP3 within the first week of the validation cycle.

SMP3 Videos

Here are some videos that cover the SAP Mobile platform 3.0:

SAP Mobile Platform 3.0 — a new way to build apps

Carolyn Fitton conducted a series of interviews with SAP product management including SAP Mobile Platform 3.0: Open, Standards-Based, and Fully Unified withTony Kueh, Mobile Security and SAP Mobile Platform 3.0 with Kiran Karunakaran and IT & Developer Experiences using SAP Mobile Platform 3.0 with myself.

Ian Thain recorded a bunch of “Code Talks” – many of them covering SMP3. Check them out at http://scn.sap.com/blogs/ithain.

SMP3 hands-on training and Ramp-Up info

If you are interested to sign up for SMP3 Ramp-Up, check out this blog: Demystifying SAP’s Ramp-Up process

More info on training can be found at Get your hands on SAP Mobile Platform 3.0

For live updates on all things SAP Mobile, follow me on Twitter @jenskoerner