- SAP Managed Tags:
BYOD: “Bring your own device. This
is a business policy of employees bringing personally owned mobile devices to their place of work and using those devices to access privileged company
resources such as email, file servers and databases as well as their personal applications and data” (source wikipedia).
Who doubts currently that smartphone “apps” have replaced “web browser sites” as the new innovation area for
communication and productivity? With current level of smartphone adoption, we have entered in a new stage of connectivity going beyond the use of the
corporate portal: people use their tablet or smartphone to work, to access remotely their corporate’s information in a different way. It is not only about using email, twitter, Flipboard or Dropbox (just to mention a few) but to be provided by companies and orgazinations
of “corporate apps” to perform duties of interest remotely and effectively.
Companies are starting to think beyond the delivery of the traditional internal productivity mobile applications, such as Field Services apps or
complete Mobile Sales and Services Systems and go deeper in the deployement of productivity and remote access data
services which are, in fact, a new generation of functionalities. This is replacing very fast the ones provided
traditionally by corporate webs. The challenge is how to produce this new generation of light applications addressed
to improve the existing business processes of the companies like shared services or management with enough speed and flexibiity for such increasing and
sophisticated demand of different roles, opperating systems and devices (clients) and business processes. This is the bottom line why SAP is
encouraging the creation of a partner eco-system to develop new apps. It is expected that 80% of the mobile apps will be coming from partners in the
future.
Is this enough? Can companies access to apps stores and find exactly what they need?. Partially yes but it is clear that they will need to build their
own. Therefore, if Platform strategy becomes logically key to manage the diversity of apps in a single instance as well as the device heterogeneity,
also this mobile platform has to enable the fast creation and deployement of internal corporate apps. One example, companies have realized that some appls
require several versions not only for device / client type but for employee readiness when performing the same role, such as “simple need” or “complex
need” with more buttons and functions. Just have a look at AppStore or GooglePlay to see how corporations (not only big ones) or organizations such as
councils or universities are fast deploying apps for the most simple to the most sophisticated query or
service: from booking a ticket to get timetables.
And this is the new generation of apps where currently we are focusing. Under the name of “mUtilities”
SAP is preparing a set services to enable Utility Companies to have a common platform For Mobile, Web & SMS services for their customers, like Move-in
& Move Out, Energy Usage, Account Management, Offerings, Warranty, Purchase, Repair request and other technical and
commercial services to be available on customers’ smartphones.
As a consecuence, Mobile middleware does not have to support only Internal Complex data exchange or light end to end single process driven apps but also
apps including services to their customers. This is any kind of direct interaction which a customer may have with our company from their smartphone.
And this is si very challenging as the configuration of the middleware technically is totally different from the configuraton of the internal
corporate applications being a massive data exchange.
Therefore, in the next years we are going to assist at the creation of a new concept of mobile platform, this is a single instance middleware capable to
manage all the variety of different apps which companies will provide to employees and customers with its different datasources in a
one-size-fits-all approach eliminating the current several approaches that companies are facing. Adoption will be very
fast, thanks to the cloud infrastructure.
