I wrote a Qualities Required for a Successful Enterprise Mobile Solution last year describing some of the important aspects of enterprise mobility. Typically enterprise standardizes their processes and enables these processes through their Enterprise Information systems like ERP, CRM etc., and users are getting enough choices when it comes to the selection of a mobile device. There are various devices which enable productivity application for the users and technology that is used for enabling these productivity applications is invariably different in different device types. There is a natural need for business process world and mobile world to take few steps closer to each other in order to enable the power of mobile in the context of business. That’s precisely what is enabled by SAP – Sybase Co-innovation platform.
Co-innovation Architecture
SAP and Sybase jointly designed an integration of their core platforms which always had been the backbone of the enterprise mobility architecture. Essentially SAP NW Data Orchestration Engine (Middleware component of SAP NetWeaver Mobile) and Sybase Unwired Platform are integrated through well defined mobile centric interface pattern which are standard based. With this approach Business Process world is brought closer to the mobile world by enabling DOE which takes care of efficient business information access (both offline and online) to talk to SUP and Enterprise mobile world is brought closer to the business process world by enabling SUP to translate business information produced by DOE in the context of native device usage. Not to forget Sybase already enables mobile application on various device types including iPhone and BlackBerry. Picture below provides a deployment view of the integrated platform. Based on this architecture already couple of solutions available in the market (Sybase Mobile Sales for SAP CRM and Sybase Mobile Workflow for SAP Business Suite)
Co-innovation Architecture Responsibilities
It is also important to understand the responsibilities of various components; otherwise there might be some confusion around integration of two middleware solutions. In this integration responsibilities are clearly separated and integrated platform provides one joint mobile infrastructure which solves end to end need of the enterprise mobility with all the required Qualities Required for a Successful Enterprise Mobile Solution.
DOE Responsibilities
- Business data responsibility determination
- Business data integrity
- Business data synchronization with delta handling and multiple version handling
- Business information direct access (like opportunity lookup)
- Server side programming model and development/customizing environment
SUP Responsibilities
- Native application & application development infrastructure for client
- Messaging and connectivity to the device
- Device management
- PIM synchronization
Joint Responsibilities
- End-2-end lifecycle management for deployment, version control and trouble shooting
- End-2-end integrated application dev and customization programming model
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