By Freya Purnell
In a bid to provide developers with the frameworks for efficient and cost-effective development on SAP’s Mobile Platform, SAP America has announced collaborations with Xamarin and Service2Media.
The mobile development environments are intended to allow enterprises to rapidly build rich and personalised mobile apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone devices from a single code base, with built-in support for SAP Mobile Platform (SMP).
SAP made the announcement at Mobile World Congress 2014, held this week in Barcelona. SAP global vice president, mobile strategy, Bill Clark said, “Today’s businesses are looking to mobile a much broader set of enterprise apps and workflows through easy-to-use yet powerful native, hybrid and web applications. To meet this demand, we are constantly looking to expand SAP Mobile Platform through support from third-party software development frameworks that companies like Xamarin and Service2Media provide and by staying true to our open standards-based, bring-your-own-tools approach.”
Xamarin’s platform enables native mobile apps to be built entirely from Microsoft’s Visual Studio environment. Xamarin and SAP will initially focus on a number of initiatives, including:
- A newly released SDK that can enable developers to create native applications capable of more easily leveraging the rich functionality and enterprise data in SMP
- A Xamarin Test Cloud with built-in SMP data verification capabilities, designed to allow developers to perform more fully automated testing of mobile apps across hundreds of devices simultaneously
- A Xamarin certified consultant program available to Xamarin’s 150 global consulting partners to help ensure efficient development of compelling apps using both Xamarin and SAP solutions.
“Xamarin is the development platform of choice for mobile developers who create high-performance enterprise mobile applications,” said Nat Friedman, CEO and co-founder, Xamarin. “We anticipate that our collaboration with SAP will make it significantly easier for developers to create rich compelling mobile applications that can leverage enterprise data and processes made available by SAP Mobile Platform.”
Service2Media has expanded its app lifecycle platform M2Active to support SMP APIs through a new connector module. “We anticipate that our relationship with SAP will ensure smooth integration of the data generated by SAP Mobile Platform directly into our software development tool chain,” said Marcel E. Smit, CEO, Service2Media.
“We can now carry our experience developing mobile consumer apps into the enterprise via one of the most flexible and comprehensive mobile enterprise application development platform in the industry. The combination of SAP and Service2Media can allow for the shortest time to market for user-friendly, feature-rich mobile enterprise apps for Service2Media’s customers.”
Photo credit: Xamarin
