By Freya Purnell
SAP Australia and New Zealand took the opportunity to announce a new partnership between Sybase Australia and Fujitsu for enterprise managed mobility solutions while Oliver Bussmann, SAP CIO, and Sanjay Poonen,
president, solutions and global mobility strategy, SAP, were in town to discuss how they are embracing key mobility trends in-house at SAP.
Under the new partnership, Fujitsu will host mobile solutions powered by Sybase Managed Mobility technologies and offer them on a software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service basis to customers in the Australian and New Zealand marketplace.
It will enable enterprises to integrate mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets with existing SAP applications as a service, with minimal set-up time and no infrastructure requirements. Fujitsu will also offer integration services and custom development for customers of the service.
SAP ANZ mobility lead Andrew Fox said Fujitsu made a natural choice as SAP’s first ANZ partner in this area, as one of only two SAP-certified cloud data centres locally.
Fujitsu’s cloud will provide the infrastructure for the solution and leverage Sybase’s enterprise device management platform, providing a solution for CIOs trying to manage the increasing number of mobile workers, devices and applications in their corporate IT environments.
Fox said among their customers, there is a 50:50 split between those who would like to have their mobile platform on-premise, and those who would prefer to have a cloud-based offering.
“The customer is looking for not just the management of the device, they are looking for apps to go out to the end user,” he said. “SAP has pushed out into the market a number of heavyweight apps for line of business solutions, and Fujitsu will take those and host them on the Sybase Unwired platform, and deliver those to both our customers and other back-end systems.”
Enterprise mobility trends
Bussmann said the consumerisation of IT is having a huge impact on enterprise IT in several ways – particularly as in-memory technology comes together with mobility.
The first is the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend, and Bussmann says to manage a diverse range of consumer devices, including iPhones, iPads and Android devices, CIOs require a mobile device management system that can both maintain the appropriate security levels and deploy apps to devices.
The next issue is what type of mobile apps should be deployed. At SAP, they have chosen apps which could enable workers to do all the typical tasks they can do in the office environment on the mobile device, such as travel expense management, leave requests and procurement; giving mobile workers such as sales staff access to the tools and information they need on the road; and providing access to business intelligence to access financials and sales numbers from any device. Providing this access can have a significant impact on behaviour.
“Because you can check business results easily with three or four clicks, consumption of business information goes up significantly too,” Bussmann said. “Overall, there is a big change going on in the business – the future desktop is a mobile one.” Poonen agreed.
“We think mobility is going to be a huge door opener for enterprise information, to enable salespeople, employees, even consumers, to get that business information and run their business more efficiently,” he said. “Every industry is now looking very strategically at how mobile transforms the way they do business internally, for their employees, and also with their customers and consumers. And that’s what we seek to take advantage of. There is a wealth of information in SAP systems that we are looking to unlock and make available to employees within organisations or more strategically, to customers’ customers.”
SAP’s takes its salesforce mobile
SAP is also putting its money where its mouth is on mobility. In addition to 20,000 BlackBerries, 10,000 iPhones, and a sprinkling of Android devices, the company has deployed 15,000 iPads to its salesforce worldwide.
“We run the complete pulse of our sales pipeline on tablets.
That is our lifeblood. Revenue and revenue growth is an early indicator of how your quarter is going to look,” Poonen said. “I run my business with a BlackBerry and an iPhone. Having this information at my fingertips and the ability to take action creates an incredible pace of business when you’re running in real-time.” Poonen said when building a business case for this type of mobility strategy, SAP considered how the two drivers of revenue growth – customers and employees – could be managed strategically with IT.
For sales, it is eliminating the need to log in to a computer, download spreadsheets, and fill in forecasts.
“If we could take that onerous, often paper-bound, spreadsheet-bound, latency driven, error-prone process, and say we’re going to make this real-time, driven by your fingertips on an iPad. You have that information about the pulse of where we’re going all the way up to the top, and you significantly increase the productivity of those workers,” Poonen said.
When you’re pursuing the vision of a real-time enterprise, you can’t let one component lag behind, Bussmann said.
“After the salesperson has visited the customer, they can immediately update that information and it goes straight into our real-time analytics and mobile solution,” he says. “You cannot slow down the beginning of the food chain – you need an end-toend optimisation, and we have all the tools to update accounts, contacts, opportunities and even pricing information in the field.” For other employees, mobilising processes in the HR area, for example, increases productivity and reduces annoyance.
“I think companies are systematically going through their business processes and finding out what are the most
cumbersome – like expense reporting,” Poonen said. “You can take a paper-bound process and make it so much faster. The whole idea of IT is that it is supposed to make people’s lives more efficient, so those are the first applications we’re going to mobilise.”
SAP has also implemented a BYOD program, in line with its belief that this trend is unstoppable, and Generation Y increasingly expects to be able to use their own devices. Bussmann said while initially the company planned to have a global policy and infrastructure, it became clear that it had to be developed on a country-by-country basis, engaging local staff from the legal, HR, and finance functions to address data security and privacy, onboarding processes and tax implications.
“We came up with a country-by-country program, beginning in Japan, to enable people to use their own iPhones, iPads and Android devices in the corporate environment. You need the mobile device management infrastructure in place to make sure that the personal device is also being managed and secured. The employee also has full access to our app store, which offers 50 SAP apps as well as over 100 partner apps,” Bussmann said, adding that the feedback from users has been very positive.
“It is also setting a mobile mindset will helps us to think about future apps that could also be moved onto the device.”
The BYOD program has been offered in Australia since September, and Fox said of his newly hired mobile team, nine out of 10 staff have opted to use the BYOD policy.
This article was first published in Inside SAP Autumn 2012
