The pace of change in enterprise mobility is extraordinary, and organisations face considerable challenges in devising a strategy and choosing the right platform. Fortunately SAP has now given customers its clearest picture yet of its roadmap, which it hopes will clear the path to adoption. Freya Purnell reports.
According to Telsyte research, mobility is now appearing in the top five critical priorities for CIOs in 2013, with 9 per cent seeing mobility as ‘critical’ and 27.8 per cent seeing it as ‘very important’. To put this in context, mobility has now assumed a higher priority than ICT spending reduction and IT/business alignment.
Certainly SAP’s experience in ANZ bears this out, with head of mobility Andrew Fox reporting the enterprise mobility market is currently around twice the size that the company planned for in 2012.
“Just about every customer that we are currently talking to either has a plan for enterprise mobility or is working on that plan for 2013,” says Fox.
Organisations across a range of industry sectors are undertaking enterprise mobility initiatives in three distinct areas.
The first area is consumer-facing apps designed to build better relationships with customers (for example, loyalty apps in retail, or mobile banking and utilities apps which could replace call centre services).
“Then change in structures caused by the ability to reach your consumers without having bricks and mortar, for example, are absolutely enormous. Banks around the world are able to grow quite significantly without having to build a brand network. That doesn’t just apply to places like Bangladesh, South Africa or India. We are working quite closely with a number of financial institutions in developed parts of the world, including here, to deliver those solutions,” Fox says.
The second area is apps built to serve a specific business purpose.
“The business case is really driven by the productivity of the road warrior. For example, organisations have built specific apps to put in the hands of their sales force, so they can demonstrate to customers and order consumables or spare parts for them,” Fox says.
Mobility architect and SAP Mentor John Moy said there is clearly a big shift towards high usability of apps in this second tranche of mobility initiatives.
“What organisations are struggling with now is workers wanting self-service functions on their mobile, executives wanting to see analytics on iPads. All of that is very business demand-driven,” Moy says.
The third area is the mobilisation of the field worker, typically in plant and asset management in sectors such as utilities and mining. SAP’s acquisition of Syclo has added considerable impetus to this area, with implementations typically integrated with either an SAP Enterprise Asset Management or Maxima back-end.
“There is an enormous opportunity for us to deliver huge value to organisations with those field workers, delivering a 10-20 per cent performance improvement and very fast return on investment,” Fox says.
Indeed, SAP was heeding customer feedback that Syclo held the solution set they needed when it acquired the business. According to Fox, Syclo has brought a metadata driven model to the SAP portfolio, which allows organisations to change applications very quickly.
“Instead of actually writing the application to a much more native layout going into SAP to connect with the external stack, you are taking the functionality inside the system and using a metadata model to layer out into the shape and form of an application,” Fox says.
Mick Windsor, chief executive of Windsor Business Solutions, believes SAP’s mobility portfolio for asset management has been greatly strengthened through the addition of Syclo, as wall as Afaria for mobile devices and Geo.e, a joint collaboration between SAP and Esri.
“Syclo brings simplicity and ease of use to the portfolio for SAP. It’s a very powerful tool behind the scenes, but it is a very easy tool for people who are not used to technology – it’s quite intuitive,” says Windsor.
SAP recently announced operations, maintenance and construction services provider Transfield had chosen its mobile application development platform including mobile device management, mobile enterprise application management and packaged mobile enterprise applications, including SAP Work Manager by Syclo, to mobilise its 24,000 workers.
“With outsourcing contracts where they provide field service work for other customers, their ability to optimise both their profits and the efficiency of the customer is paramount, and they regard that as a huge competitive advantage as they go forward,” Fox says.
SAP’s maturing strategy
2012 has also seen SAP provide a new level of clarity on its mobile roadmap, which has three stages: step one is integrating the Sybase Unwired Platform with the Syclo Agentry Platform to provide a run-side environment for writing enterprise apps; step two is integrating this with the Mobilizer platform, the consumer app platform from Sybase; and step three, providing that unified code base both as an on-premise model and as a cloud solution.
“That’s the roadmap we will be working towards, and the foundation of what Sanjay Poonen [president, technology and innovation products, SAP] described as our attempt to be the Apple of the enterprise,” Fox says. “Because then you can write mobile applications through a consistent standard that you can publish on some form of application store, and everyone can use them because they are certified by SAP to run in our environment. It’s a brave and quite aggressive plan but we are already seeing signs that we are on track in delivering.”
Moy also believes that SAP has taken positive steps this year to show where they are going, and have made a number of excellent moves, including partnerships with Sencha, Appcelerator and Adobe, and differentiating itself by providing an application store with off-the-shelf apps.
“I think we’re at a turning point. When Sanjay Poonen took over, I think he actually provided a lot of leadership,” Moy says. “The fact that they have a roadmap to unify the whole thing under the banner of the SAP mobile platform, that the pricing has become more transparent in the last six months, and the fac that they’re now more vocal about rolling out mobility as a service in hosted or cloud-based offerings – I think that’s all been positive.”
However, he warns that it still takes time for customers to understand the way forward. At the same time, there are many other players in the market, some of whom have also been hot on the acquisition trail, including Antenna and Kony Solutions, which bought Sky Technologies in August. It’s not just big players either – small companies are also offering their own mobility platforms to SAP customers
“I think that it’s actually making it more confusing for customers because now it’s not just even SAP, everyone has a platform and everyone has a solution,” Moy says.
He says he would like to see SAP deliver mobile as a managed service, rather than simply striking partnerships with others, to make the pricing structures even more transparent.
“Not every customer wants to open up that type of relationship, because they already might be using a competitor as their strategic partner. It’s just that little bit of extra friction in the whole process, and while that’s happening, customers are getting all these options put in front of them,” Moy says. “Now that SAP is officially getting serious about cloud with SuccessFactors, maybe they should be running their own service.”
Developing an enterprise mobility strategy
Enterprise mobility is still changing so rapidly, it’s almost impossible to keep up.
“There was a quote I remember reading not long ago, which pretty much summed it up. It was about a company that had acquired another one just to get a little bit of extra functionality that they could have built in six months,” Moy says. “But then the article went on to say, six months is aeons. It’s so true, everything is changing so quickly.”
Organisations should start with a mobility strategy, but following the traditional model of setting out a five-year path probably won’t work given the pace of change.
“You want to spend some time to basically collect your thoughts around what is important to the organisation, what are the use cases that are going to bring the most value, can we prioritise and can we have a framework where we can continually keep that prioritisation fluid,” Moy says. “There are big questions about whether you’re focusing on enterprise versus consumer, because they are such massive differences in ways of thinking and what platform is best to serve those.”
Customers are common asking questions about where to start, according to Fox – what platform should they choose, should they wait for the next release, should they choose off-the-shelf or custom-built apps? It all comes back to the business case.
“If the business case for a mobile app has a payback which is months, then you start now and deliver on that payback in the knowledge that you are probably going to want to implement that application with a different look and feel in a three- to six-month timeframe anyway,” he says. “If it’s an application on a wishy-washy business case that might have a multi-year payback, you’d probably wait until we firm up the product and the roadmap so it will be easier to implement.”
While the conversation with organisations about mobile initiatives often start with mobile device management (MDM), preceding any discussions about strategic platforms, Fox says SAP is probably not the right choice if MDM is the endgame.
“If it’s about delivering the apps for this business case or to these people, and if it’s about managing multiple applications through a lifecycle, then the conversation becomes much broader,” he says.
Considering any one platform is difficult for customers at the moment, Moy says, given the breadth of options and the high level of acquisition activity.
“I think customers should look at what’s on offer, but really do some due diligence. Consider that you don’t always need your platform on-premise. I’m a proponent of considering a managed model – in other words, a platform in the cloud,” he says.
By opting for a managed service, organisations may also be able to avoid the expense of full-time resources available to manage an on-premise system – if they can find people with the right skills in such a rapidly changing environment.
“That’s actually skills just in the platform management area, there are also the skills for developing apps,” Moy says.
“Because mobile is changing so rapidly, the platforms have to abstract you from the different devices. The platform is not your traditional SAP system, which you create once every three years, it’s something you need to patch every month or so.”
[breakout] Html vs native appsAnother battle is emerging between business and IT, over whether native apps or HTML apps are the right choice for the enterprise.
“On the one hand, native is basically saying I prioritise usability above all else, and on the other, using HTML5 or mobile web, I’m minimising my development and support cost by being able to code as much as possible and provide cross-platform support,” Moy says.
In its strategic technology outlook for 2013, Gartner highlighted the complexity of the market for tools to create consumer and enterprise-facing apps, with over 100 potential vendors. The analyst firm predicts that no single tool will be optimal for all types of mobile applications, so organisations should expect to employ several, but there will be a long-term shift from native to web apps as HTML5 becomes more capable.
Moy says at the moment he is seeing a lot of fracturing in the SAP world, and that the native or HTML choice also needs to be based on the business case.
“The reality is it’s possible to be native if you’re only targeting one or two specific platforms. If you have a consumer-focused app, they just won’t settle for anything less, plus your market is bigger,” he says. “If you’re building a very specialised app that might service 100 people in your organisation, the only way you might get the business case up is by building a simple HTML app. It might not be as usable, but that may be the only way you can actually get the funding and pull that off based on the value proposition.”
This article was originally published in Inside SAP magazine Summer edition.
