The Future of SAP Mobile Platform
A number of news outlets recently incorrectly reported that SAP is getting out of the Mobile development platform market. Nothing could be further from the truth…
To help our customers take advantage of the latest innovations in mobility, we have focused our development efforts on SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services – SAP’s primary solution for mobile app development and delivery for the past few years.
Some news articles misconstrued the truth and failed to report is that SAP has been and will continue to invest heavily in mobile. I want to reiterate that mobility is very important to SAP. SAP believes that the delivery of mobile apps is ubiquitous and necessary for our customers.; part and parcel to delivering digital experiences that our customers are prioritizing.
We have invested significantly in our cloud based Mobile Platform over the past several years. For example, we partnered with Apple to deliver an iOS SDK that makes it easy to deliver complex, rich, native iOS apps. We introduced a mobile card creation capability in order to deploy small datasets to mobile devices in a “micro app” form factor. And we added a low-code mobile app development feature to foster visual mobile app development.
Going forward, our mobile investments will be heavily focused on SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Service. This includes continued innovations in the SDK for iOS, enhancements to the micro app tool, and a priority on the low-code mobile developer kit. This single integrated mobile offering serves customers by providing a solution that integrates with both on-premises and cloud-based data sources, while innovating at the speed of the cloud.
SAP will continue to deliver incremental quality enhancements to customers’ existing on-premises investments in SAP Mobile Platform per SAP terms and conditions. All customers with active maintenance agreements can expect the SAP Mobile Platform to be supported per SAP guidelines.
We recommend customers who are currently running SAP Mobile Platform on premises consider moving to SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services at their convenience. There are many advantages of SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services.
1) Lower costs
If you take the operational cost into account, on-premises deployments easily become more expensive compared with cloud solutions as the following effort comes on top:
- Installation (Landscape preparation, automation scripts…)
- DB administration, incl. backup and quarterly backup sanity check, DB upgrade
- Patch installation (including testing )
- Upgrade installation (including regression testing)
- Hardware upgrades
- And more.
If you move to SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services, all these actions are handled by SAP, including SAP Cloud Enterprise Support in data centers around the world.
2) Faster access to innovations
While you still get improvements on SAP Mobile Platform, our product roadmap is focusing on innovations on SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services. If you want to benefit from these features, you need to get them in the cloud.
3) SAP Cloud Platform family
As part of SAP Cloud Platform, you can leverage the full power of the rich enterprise feature set offered around Mobile Services. Starting from SAP HANA or ASE databases, to runtimes for JAVA, HANA XS, HTML5 and even ABAP you have a full toolbox available to build your digital enterprise. Moving to SAP Cloud Platform for your mobility projects opens a new world of possibilities for your enterprise.
I plan to discuss the technical options for migrating from SAP Mobile Platform to SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services in a separate blog post.
We continue to provide support for SAP Mobile Platform, but recommend you to consider migrating your apps to SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services.
If you’re not already familiar with SAP Cloud Platform mobile services, check out these resources:
- A great blog that explains why moving to SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services can help customers embrace mobility across their enterprise.
- An over of the SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services offering
- An overview of SAP Cloud Platform
Have fun,
Martin
This reminds me of a blog I wrote in 2012 '7 Reasons why SAP’s Mobile Platform belongs in the Cloud'. It's why I've only recommended to my customers over the years to land on cloud-based mobile platforms.
Regards
John
Hi John,
so I might assume that you now promote SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services to your customers going forward.
-Martin
Hi Martin,
I've noticed that your post has changed wholly in substance and tone from the earlier edition (compare with this). I should point out that this isn't good blogging etiquette. It would have been preferable if the new content was provided as an addendum or a follow-up blog.
In any case, I've written my blog response here ... http://www.bluet.com.au/2018/02/05/reflecting-on-another-turn-in-saps-mobile-strategy/
Regards
John
Hi Martin,
great to see that the author can change a good part of a blog and SCN isn't making this visible somehow. Or the author.
RIP SMP 3 on premise. No big surprise here. The cost of running SMP OP isn't that high: some VMs, unfortunately, no Docker containers are made available. A cost factor is to have a team that manages all the VMs. And the integration, And the TLS certificates. And the monitoring. And <list goes on>
For the end user or developers, the impact should be close to zero, thanks to the REST API that is shared between cloud and on premise version.
What I'd have to look up is the impact this has on Agentry (custom apps, etc) and security. With SMP on premise I can check if a user certificate is revoked, not sure if this already works with HCPms.
If cloud or on premise, biggest problem when running SMP is: apps. FMC is nice, and devs can do a lot with the provided tools. But a packaged Inbox app, or EHS app, etc could help justifying the effort. Specially as now HCPms is cloud only, meaning it will be compared even more with all the other native cloud mobile platforms.
Looking forward...
Hello Martin,
Thanks for this informative blog.
So what should we tell customers who need offline enablement in the mobile SAP apps we develop to them, if they are not willing to move to SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services. In case there is security or political reasons for that..... ? For them on-premis SAP Mobile Platform is the only solution they want and if SAP does stop this support, what options are there then?
Regards
August
Hello Martin,
SAP should reflect and discuss the pros and cons of the cloud solution clearly and transparently, there should be a comparison between the on premise and the cloud solutions and what can be / can’t be done on each.
I have a previous bad experience with SUP (Sybase) when SAP sunset it giving a short notice to client who was left with no options.
Hello Martin,
Could you please tell why you recommend to move to SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services while SAP will release SAP Mobile Platform (SMP) 3.1 in Q4/2019? Is SAP planning to discontinue development of SMP after End of Maintenance for SMP 3.1 (which is 30.11.2022)?
Best regards,
Nikita Elsakov
Hi Nikita,
there are many good reasons for migration of SMP, as described above. Innovations like the SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS, or SAP Cloud Platform SDK for Android, SAP Mobile Cards, Mobile Development Kit are all NOT available for SMP. High maintenance cost is another reason.
The SMP 3.1 release just buys you more time to migrate. There is (almost) no reason to use SMP anymore. Regulatory environments are one.
Since Mobile Services, as a technology, does not hold your business data in the cloud - as for example an CRM system would do. Therefore it it a much easier and different discussions to migrate off SMP than to move your CRM to a cloud solution. Both can be done, but Mobile is simpler.
License price and TCO is another good reason 😉
Hope that helps.
Regards,
Martin
Hi Martin,
Thanks for the quick reply! Sure, you helped me alot and now I know what to tell our customers if they would like to use SMP instead of SCPms.
Best regards,
Nikita Elsakov
Hi Martin,
Do you still plan on writing another blog discussing the options for migration or do you have an idea of the required steps to move SMP3.0 to SCPms?
-Alex
Hi Axel,
thanks for remembering me. The blog is already written and in review at the moment. I hope it will be published until end of this month.
Regards,
Martin
Great! I look forward to your next blog. I've done a fair amount of digging and feel like the steps to move from SMP on-premise to SCPms has yet to be documented. Maybe the necessary steps are minimal and that's why I can't find much. Either way, having a specific blog post dedicated to this topic is something to look forward to.
Thanks again,
-Alex
Hi Alex,
here it is: https://blogs.sap.com/2019/02/01/migration-to-sap-cloud-platform-mobile-services/
-Martin
Hi Martin Grasshoff,
that's mean SMP OP is dead? It's a bit worrying for the company where I work because we have a some clients that work only with OP applications, not cloud or external communication allowed for IT security rules in our customers.
What's the future for this type of apps? I can't found clearly information.
Regards,