Recently, sanjay.poonen wrote a blog about his vision for mobility, and COMPUTERWORLD published a related article, “SAP Aims to be the Apple of Enterprise Mobility”. To see how we can turn these visions into reality, I’m going to delve one level deeper and focus on the SAP Mobile Platform. This blog is focused on business-to-employee (B2E) apps.
When Sanjay asked me to join product management for the mobile platform, the first thing I did was ponder what mobile actually means for the enterprise. How is it different from Apple apps and iTunes? In the spirit of true design thinking, stan.stadelman, from product management, and I whiteboarded how enterprise mobility should work and what a platform’s role is in that picture. We also compared enterprise mobility to the gold-standard of a mobile experience – Apple.
Why Do We Need an Enterprise Mobile Platform?
Apple doesn’t sell you a mobile platform, yet, via the iTunes store, it enables the roll-out of business apps, like Tripit, to millions of users. Granted, I need a development environment to create apps, but if I don’t want to develop apps myself, I don’t need Apple’s xCode. So why do I need a platform in the enterprise world?
When we look a little closer at enterprise mobility, we see that there are more challenges than in the Apple example. Here are three obvious challenges when you “go enterprise”:
Yet, the end user expects an Apple-easy experience – without virtual private networks (VPN), the need to enter backend server strings, or prompts for a username/password. Whether users download Tripit, Angry Birds, or your company’s leave request app, they should be able to click on the app to run it. The user expects all these apps to function the same way:
Graphic 1: mobile apps
This is where the mobile platform comes into play. It takes care of the enterprise challenges such as cross-platform, backend connectivity, security, and much more – to keep all of this complexity away from the end user and keep things Apple-easy.
So let’s dive in…
In the following we will discuss
Mobile Platform Constituencies
To define the platform correctly, we need to know its constituencies – and we don’t have to look far - SAP’s vision for mobile states them:
1,000,000 developers, 10,000 customers, a billion users
So our constituencies are:
A successful platform has to cater to all 3 constituencies and their respective mobile app needs
And it seems intuitive to center the user experience of a mobile platform around the “mobile app definition” (as opposed to e.g. security profiles, landscape definitions etc). That begs the question:
What is a mobile app?
For the user, that question is easily answered: it’s that little icon on their phone: the Angry Birds, Tripit, or Leave Request
For a developer, that notion of an app is not enough. For a developer, the icon (actually the binary) is just one part of the app – and there might be multiple binaries for an app (one for Apple, one for Android, one for Windows etc.).
For a developer an application is a collection of multiple app components:
Graphic 2: mobile app components
For the Enterprise the picture of what an app is becomes even more extensive.
For procurement an app are all the different software components described above that the developer creates, but for them it’s also the licensing info associated with it.
For the enterprise administrator, it’s all the above mentioned components plus the enterprise specific items that need to be in place for an app to function in an enterprise. These items include: security policy for the app, user permissions, push notification configuration, custom branding and enhancements etc.
So as you can see, from this discussion, while the notion of an app is very intuitive (the icon on my phone) there is a lot more to it and it’s not trivial to make an app work in the enterprise for thousands of users. It’s like the classical iceberg – there is more to it that what meets the eye:
Graphic 3: enterprise apps – there is more involved than what meets the eye
It’s the mobile platform’s job take care of the items "below the water line" and to reduce this complexity and make things simple again – and Apple-easy for the end-user.
How things should be… End-2-End Platform experience
So what is the overall mobile platform experience supposed to be? What does "Apple for the enterprise" look like? Let’s take a look:
Create the app (Developer)
It all starts with the app creator - be that an individual developer, a customer who wants to develop an app, a partner – small or large – or the SAP app development teams. There are two distinct cases:
Let’s discuss the case of a standard app that is to be sold to multiple customers.
A developer will need "vanilla" backend systems to develop against. Ideally the platform infrastructure allows him to commission backend systems (e.g. SAP ERP or CRM) in the cloud along with a service to expose the relevant services and data easily (e.g. via SAP Gateway). The developer will want a variety of tools at his disposal to create the different parts of the app we mentioned above:
These developer tools should provide a variety of functionality that take care of the enterprise features and thus allowing the developer to focus on the development of his app. These functions and services include:
To give the developers choice of tooling, these services and functions should be delivered as plug-ins into the different design and development tools such as:
Once the app is developed, a developer will want to monetize it via the SAP store, which allows the developer to sell his mobile app around the world without having to establish a sales force in every country. He will also be interested in license and app usage reporting. All of that should be provided by the platform and the SAP store.
In the case of development for or by a customer some of the services are slightly different:
Manage the app (Administrator)
The whole enterprise administration of the app is really the step that does not exist in the Apple world – but it is critical for the enterprise (see here). As mentioned in the intro, there are at least 2 things an admin has to do even in the simplest of cases: he has to connect the app to your own backend and he has to establish a secure user authentication in line with your IT security policy. But that is only the simplest of cases. There usually a lot more to it – e.g. the management of apps across different operating systems. In addition, the administrator has to handle and merge 2 lifecylces:
So let’s look at what an enterprise admin would expect from a mobile platform. The administrator has 2 main jobs:
The platform has to address both items and ensure that the initial roll out of applications to thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of users is cost effective. Consultants are usually expensive resources and customers don’t want to keep them around forever to get apps rolled.
Almost more important though is the operations of the apps – ideally no consulting help is needed and operations can be moved to lower cost resources.
So, what does the platform have to offer to help with roll out and operations –
All of these services are designed to reduce the cost of setting up and running the applications.
But there are request for more advanced features such as
Graphic 4: mobile platform in the cloud – admin console
Consume the app (End-User)
Well, this one is easy: user downloads the app and starts using it. All onboarding, app registration and bootstrapping is done by the platform: server strings, logon information or certificates are pushed to the user’s device without the user having to do anything – Apple easy!
In summary we have 5 steps:
Graphic 5: end-to-end picture of an enterprise mobile app – Apple for the enterprise
That is what I would call “Apple for the enterprise” - that's the goal that keeps me going everyday as a product manager for the SAP mobile platform...
Further information
For live updates on all things SAP Mobile, follow me on Twitter @jenskoerner
Check out Jim Jaquet’s interview with me at SAP TechEd in Madrid
carolyn.fitton’s blog 3 reasons why developers use SAP Mobile Platform to create enterprise grade apps
Watch kevin.benedict's Mobile Expert Video Series
sanjay.poonen's keynote at Enterprise Mobility. At minute 44:01 we are demoing the platform
carolyn.fitton's blog 3 for 1: SAP Mobile Platform Meets 3 Different User Group Requirements contains 3 videos that provide a great overview of the value of the mobile platform.
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