By Emily Jacobs
SAP has announced the 3.0 release of its SAP Mobile Platform and a cloud
version powered by the SAP HANA platform at the SAP TechEd conference
held in Las Vegas.
The latest versions feature an open standards-based architecture and a ‘bring-your-own-tools’ strategy, with the aim of drawing interest from developers.
“Today’s most successful businesses run mobile, so to stay competitive companies need to move quickly to implement a future-proof mobile strategy on an integrated, open, standards-based mobile platform,” said Anthony Reynolds, senior vice president, worldwide mobile sales and solutions, SAP.
“We worked extensively with customers and partners to design and build our breakthrough new platform to provide a seamless user experience that lowers total cost of ownership for IT and lowers total cost of development for any type of mobile app.”
Version 3.0 will combine SAP’s NetWeaver Gateway, Sybase Mobiliser and Syclo Agentry products to meet current and future mobile application use.
The platform is intended to include core services such as authentication, on-boarding configuration, life-cycle management and logging and data integration.
“Our research shows that all applications will be mobilised, making full application lifecycle management critical for protecting mobile investment,” said Chris Marsh, principal analyst, Yankee Group.
“Companies will look to integrated platforms along with open standards and interoperability to gain longevity.”
Extensive use of HTML5 in both the product and for building apps is also expected to be included in the future-ready architecture.
The ‘bring-your-own-tools’ strategy will be backed with software development kit (SDKs) provided by SAP and libraries for building native and hybrid apps. Additional capabilities to reduce costs will include common SDKs for on-premise and cloud apps, WYSIWYG development environment for HTML5 apps, BYOT support and offline/synchronisation support.
The cloud version of SAP Mobile Platform 3.0 is based on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, which allows customers to build and deploy custom applications in SAP data centres globally.
It will allow for the fast deployment of native and hybrid apps on iOS, Android, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Blackberry.
Other upgrades include the introduction of SAP Mobile App Protection, which will help companies increase their security on apps running on iOS and Android devices. iPhone and Android support has also been added to SAP’s Mobile Documents product.
“This new release is a major overhaul which allows them to write once, deploy everywhere,” said Ray Wang, an analyst from Constellation Research. “Embedded security, mobile app stores, and community are key to their potential success this time around.”
