At the SAP Influencer Summit on Tuesday, the company touted its mobile milestones and achievements for 2011, while promising major upgrades and improvements to its mobile software.
Below are a bunch of slides from the keynote presentation by Sybase Executive Vice-President and head of SAP Mobile Applications, Dr. Raj Nathan, along with some of his quotes, my commentary, and reaction from the 200 or so analysts and journalists tweeting from the event (#SAPSummit) in Boston.
Slide decks for other presentations by co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe, SAP Executive Board member in charge of technology and innovation, Vishal Sikka and President of Solutions Go-to-Market, Sanjay Poonen, and other videos from breakout sessions later today and Wednesday are available at the SAP Virtual Summit page.
(Click on the slides to open larger in a new window, and then right-click to save to your computer.)
As I hinted in my preview blog to the Summit, SAP had some ambitious internal goals to meet this year. There was some momentum at my employer Sybase, but there was no guarantee that the integration wouldn't make things grind to an ugly halt.
Well, SAP has met its goal of bringing out 30+ line-of-business mobile apps.
And SAP has performed on the sales side, too: 350+ new customers, 17.5 million total end user seats sold.
Visit the latest Enterprise Mobility newsletter from Sybase to view links to the customer videos below - Tommy Hilfiger, Boston Scientific, Charite Berlin, CSC, Simba Dickie, Tasnee and more.
(I realize that seats sold does not equal active workers deployed and using today, as my headline above implies. Which is why I clarify it now.)
SAP/Sybase are, according to Nathan, responding to the mobility trends above, including the need to manage the entire lifecycle of both consumer and enterprise apps, improve the user interface of apps, and accomodate and woo developers who want to use HTML5 technology, and more.
Basically, enterprises want their mobile device management (MDM) software to do more. Strong security is already becoming commoditized in the iOS arena. The only forward for non-platform vendors is to augment with the features above, says Nathan.
For SAP and Sybase, this means bringing Afaria and Sybase Unwired Platform ever closer together, until they become a truly unified platform.
It also means adding the ability to manage non-enterprise apps and letting enterprise developers build lightweight Web apps ever faster. At that point, what you have is a greater platform that does what some are calling Enterprise Mobility Management.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_mobility_management
Raj also talked up the new SAP Store for Mobile Apps and the roadmap above. Read this for more slides and an interview with Usman Sheikh, the vice-president at SAP Ecohub in charge of the new SAP Store for Mobile Apps.
