By Anne Widjaja
Although SAP’s innovation roadmap focused on expanding its real-time platform offering, at the same press conference, SAP also announced its plans to ramp up its mobility strategy, through the acquisition of Syclo, a leading provider of enterprise mobile applications and technologies, and new agreements with Adobe, Appcelerator and Sencha to support an open mobile apps development framework.
The acquisition of Syclo represents a significant growth opportunity for SAP. As an established SAP partner, Syclo already has more than 600 customers in 39 countries across all major asset and mobile-intensive industries.
According to SAP, Syclo’s technology offers a mature set of applications that complement SAP in key mobile areas such as enterprise asset management (EAM), field services, inventory management and approvals/workflow.
Following the close of the acquisition, which is expected in the second quarter of 2012, Syclo apps will be integrated with the SAP mobile platform and SAP Afaria for mobile device management and security.
“With this acquisition, SAP adds momentum to our already powerful mobile portfolio, advancing our vision and leadership while accelerating our mobile apps,” said Sanjay Poonen, president, global solutions, SAP. “Syclo brings both domain-savvy expertise and industry-leading solutions, as recognised by customers and analysts. This will drive innovation and mobility in the workplace.”
SAP also announced that it would support Adobe’s PhoneGap, Appcelerator’s Titanium Development Platform and Sencha’s Touch in an open partner and developer mobile app ecosystem. This will enable millions of developers to effectively build mobile apps based on their choice of client architectures – from native to hybrid Web container to mobile Web.
Poonen said that the expansion of SAP’s mobile strategy was a reflection of the company’s desire to advance their vision for the mobility market.
“By joining forces with leading mobile app development vendors like Adobe, Appcelerator and Sencha, we are making it easier for large communities of developers, in the millions, to innovate on our platform,” he said.
Poonen also emphasised the importance of offering developers a flexible range of choices.
“We believe SAP is the only mobile platform provider delivering on the promise of an open platform architecture that supports innovative third-party development environments and tools, providing flexibility for customers to implement the right mobile app every time.
“SAP, customers, partners and the entire ecosystem now have a tremendous opportunity to rapidly produce millions of high quality apps using the tool of their choice,” he said.
