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LAS VEGAS — To meet heavy business demand for secure, cost-effective mobile app development both on premise and in the cloud, SAP AG today announced the 3.0 release of SAP Mobile Platform and a cloud version powered by the SAP HANA platform for real-time enterprise performance. The latest versions are intended to provide unmatched productivity for developers via a comprehensive set of platform services, an open standards-based architecture and by embracing a “bring-your-own-tools” (BYOT) strategy through integration with third-party development tools. Millions of developers shall be able to use SAP Mobile Platform to create beautiful user-centric employee, business and consumer mobile apps, rather than spending time learning new tools and protocols. The announcement was made at SAP TechEd, being held October 21-25 in Las Vegas.
“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. Early interest and feedback is fantastic and we are excited to bring this new platform to the broader market.”
With a forecasted 102 billion mobile apps to be downloaded in 2013i, many app developers now prefer to develop for mobile devices over desktops.
“Our research shows that all applications will be mobilized, 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. The leading mobile app platforms will be characterized by open and extensible architectures, an API management and data orchestration layer, extensive developer libraries, agnosticism to tools, infrastructures and standards, integrated testing and analytics and a rich ecosystem.”
As the leader in helping companies large and small mobilize their businessesii, SAP plans to offer one of the most mature and proven mobile app development platforms. To expand on the previous integration of Sybase Unwired Platform, the 3.0 release of SAP Mobile Platform shall integrate the primary mobile application solutions from SAP — including SAP NetWeaver Gateway technology, Sybase Mobiliser and Syclo Agentry — to meet current and future mobile app use cases. The combination is envisioned to provide businesses of all sizes and in all industries a complete, highly flexible platform capable of handling mobile requirements for designing, building, testing, deploying, scaling and securely optimizing any app for any user.
“User adoption of the apps we created with SAP Mobile Platform has been tremendous,” said Peter Matzek, business product owner, Varian Medical Systems Inc. “Four hundred engineers were running the field service app within a month, and as soon as word spread about how great it was, the rest asked, ‘How can I get it?’ Having the tools you need to do your job better is a good feeling, especially when you are helping to save lives.”
Broad Set of Platform Services
To deliver a cost-effective solution for designing employee, business and consumer mobile apps, SAP Mobile Platform shall not require re-engineering of processes, resources or existing infrastructure. The platform is designed to keep developers “out of the weeds” and focused on creating a compelling user experience building on essential core and application services. These are envisioned to include core services that run in mobile apps, such as authentication, onboarding configuration, life-cycle management, logging and data integration; app services targeted for more specific functions around mobile commerce, including couponing, loyalty and mobile banking, and geolocation. Support for native, hybrid, meta-data driven, mobile Web and SMS app architectures is also planned to be featured.
Open, Standards-Based Platform
To provide a premier user experience for developers without requiring training on new tools, SAP Mobile Platform is intended to offer a future-ready architecture based on open-standards and open-source technologies that incorporate the latest mobile technologies. These shall include offline capabilities using the Open Data Protocol (OData) standard; OSGi architecture with Spring and Equinox frameworks; open-source Apache Cordova container with platform plug-ins; extensive use of HTML5 both in the product and for building apps; and HTTP REST APIs common across the on-premise and cloud versions of the platform.
Unparalled Developer Productivity Improvements
To optimize productivity while helping reduce development time and maintenance costs, developers shall still be able to choose their preferred development tools, augmented with software developer kits (SDKs) provided by SAP and libraries for building native and hybrid apps. Additional capabilities to help reduce total cost of development shall include common SDK for both on-premise and cloud mobile apps; WYSIWYG development environment for HTML5 apps; BYOT support; standards-based data integration; and offline/synchronization support.
“‘Bring-your-own-device’ is dramatically increasing smartphone and tablet usage in the enterprise, thereby elevating mobile apps to the mission-critical sphere for all businesses today,” said Morris Beton, general manager, Developer Programs & Strategic Alliances, Intel. “The requirement for mobile apps demands that IT provide a highly scalable mobile platform for effective support. To better understand how SAP Mobile Platform provides a foundation of valuable tools for IT and developers in a single deployment, SAP and Intel engineers benchmarked a representative system under a full range of mobile app scenarios. We found the 3.0 version can easily scale from hundreds of users to thousands, delivering the level of support users expect from enterprise IT organizations”
Unified Cloud Offering for Faster, Simpler Innovation
The cloud version of SAP Mobile Platform 3.0 is built on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, an open, standards-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that shall allow SAP customers and partners to build and deploy custom applications in SAP data centers around the world. The cloud version shall also allow for rapid deployment of packaged, highly scalable native and hybrid apps on iOS, Android, Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and BlackBerry. As part of SAP HANA Cloud Platform, mobile cloud version users also have access to other services, including analytics, integration, security and SAP HANA.
SAP Runs SAP Mobile Platform
Internally, SAP relies on the unique ability of SAP Mobile Platform to scale and support more than 55,000 devices and 60 mobile apps across all business functions, including sales, marketing, services, development and operations.
“We run enterprise mobility at scale and require a highly secure and flexible platform to support all major mobile device types,” said Mike Golz, CIO, SAP Americas. “SAP Mobile Platform is the industry-leading solution that allows us to quickly evolve with the rapidly changing mobile market. We anticipate significant developer, IT and business benefits from the latest release based on the integration of best-in-class SAP mobile technology into a single, end-to-end solution.”
A 30-day free trial of SAP Mobile Platform is available on SAP Community Network in the Developer Center for SAP Mobile Platform and a free mobile development course is available on the openSAP platform. SAP also wants to collaborate with the best and brightest developers to build a community of amazing mobile apps and send the winner of its upcoming “Mobile Game On” app contest on the trip of a lifetime in 2014. To learn more, visit www.sap.com/mobile.
For more information, including additional announcements and coverage from SAP TechEd Las Vegas, visit the SAP Newsroom.
iGartner “Forecast: Mobile App Stores, Worldwide, 2013 Update” by Sandy Shen and Brian Blau, September 5, 2013
iiGartner “Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms” by Ian Finley, Van Baker, Ken Parmelee, David Mitchell Smith, Ray Valdes, Gordon Van Hulzen, August 7, 2013
SAP TechEd in 2013: Las Vegas, Amsterdam, and Bangalore
SAP customers, partners, and technical experts are expected to convene at SAP TechEd in 2013, the company’s premier technical conference. Hands-on workshops, demo-driven lectures, and Q&A sessions on the latest developments in analytics, mobile, cloud, database, and in-memory computing enable SAP TechEd attendees to enhance their skills while making valuable connections with peers and IT experts from the SAP community. SAP TechEd is being held in Las Vegas, Nevada, from October 21-25, and will be held in Amsterdam, Netherlands, from November 5-7; and Bangalore, India, from December 11-13. Follow SAP TechEd on Twitter at @SAPTechEd and join the conversation at #SAPTechEd.
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