Although 60% of all the business applications and data around the world run on SAP systems, John Chen, Sybase CEO, is eyeing the other 40% as well as the “uncharted hundreds of percents from all the developing countries of the world.”

In an attempt to reach those segments, SAP will be releasing a software development kit (SDK) to provide the SAP ecosystem the ability to develop mobile applications using SAP’s back end. The SDK is slated to be released by next spring. Jim Hagemann Snabe, SAP co-CEO, says delivering the platform for mobility will allow it to push out rapid mobile innovations for users from all kinds of industries and geographies globally.

The strategy was discussed at press conference in Boston that revealed SAP’s mobile plan after acquiring Sybase, a leader in enterprise and mobile software. SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott and Chen led the press conference in Boston while Hagemann Snabe led a similar and teleconferenced press conference in Frankfurt, Germany.

In addition to using the SDK to reach distant corners of the market, SAP plans to leverage Sybase’s established presence in Asia to reach areas in which SAP has yet to establish a great presence. McDermott said that SAP needs to take a look at essential areas such as “China and Japan that skipped the desktop altogether. In fact, the mobile is the new desktop.”

“[Sybase is] a leader in Japan and especially in China, which is now the second largest economy in the world and a place we need to grow our business and will grow our business,” he said.

A New Mobile Platform within Nine Months

At the event, SAP and Sybase top executives discussed a mobile platform that the two companies will deliver by next spring that crosses all major mobile operating systems and devices. “Within nine months, we’ll deliver a leading platform upon which customers can consume SAP applications anywhere on any device,” said McDermott.

The platform will be based on open standards, allowing SAP’s partners and customers to develop applications in addition to SAP’s offerings. “Both companies believe in leveraging the ecosystem and having a very open approach to customers as we know they all operate very heterogeneous environments,” said McDermott.

In a demo presented at the press conference, Jim Dever of SAP Global Communications and a colleague walked through an example scenario describing how “mobility gives the chance to reach the discrete customer in regions of the world that they never could before,” said Dever. In the scenario, Dever described a consumer electronics company that wished to get closer to its customers. The company offered customers a discount code if they submitted their cell phone numbers to the company. When customers submit their information and claim the code, the company is able to obtain valuable purchasing data that can be used for more targeted marketing in the future.

In addition to more direct ways to reach the customers, SAP described a focused interest on faster reporting via in-memory computing at the event, a topic both SAP and Sybase feel is of high importance today. McDermott described one of the reasons Sybase was attractive to SAP, saying, “They understood the power of in-memory technology as a major disrupting force in this traditional database market. This is something we have in common between the two companies.”

In-memory computing is gaining increasing popularity as companies seek out ever-faster transaction times. The technology stores data compressed in-memory for immediate reporting instead of waiting for records to transfer to a hard drive for processing and analysis. SAP and Sybase plan to integrate the technology into their data management offerings to cut report time down from hours to seconds

Upcoming Milestones

SAP outlined three areas of focus for the coming months:

• Enterprise Mobility

According to SAP, SAP and Sybase “will integrate the SAP NetWeaver Mobile component and SAP BusinessObjects Mobile software with Sybase Unwired Platform to deliver a single mobile development and deployment platform with integrated analytics.”

Using the mobile platform the companies will create in the next nine months, SAP will increase the availability of business data outside of the office across the SAP product portfolio. SAP says it will deliver industry-specific mobile applications on the new platform and open standards-based technology will allow partners to create mobile applications on the platform as well. 

• Business Analytics

In the area of business analytics, Hagemann Snabe said, “Both companies have leading technologies and the combination will be extremely strong.” SAP intends to offer a complete and optimized business analytics infrastructure using SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions. The offerings will include discovery, storage, and consumption of data. SAP will leverage in-memory computing to allow users to access SAP data on any device.

• Enterprise Information Management (EIM)

In a move that SAP says will supply the industry’s broadest EIM solution portfolio, SAP and Sybase will port, certify, and optimize the SAP Business Suite, SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, SAP BusinessObjects Data Services software, and SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions onto Sybase’s Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) database. Sybase ASE supports transactional and mixed workloads and will be supported by both Sybase and SAP. The move will provide companies with an additional choice of database platforms on which to run SAP applications.

In response to an audience question at the press conference concerning porting SAP applications to mobile devices, Hagemann Snabe said, “Let me make one thing clear, we are not porting the application to mobile, we are allowing the mobile device to access the application. So it’s not like we have to rewrite the logic of the application … It’s about using the mobile device as a front end for that kind of application.”

Sybase Will Run Independently of SAP

McDermott reiterated the company’s plan to allow Sybase to run independently of SAP, which will itself begin running Sybase software soon, and stressed that Sybase’s current product portfolio will continue on. Sybase sales will run completely separately, Hagemann Snabe said, but complementary to SAP’s sales. Both companies will sell the upcoming mobile platform.

“Sybase will run as an independent operation, partly because we want to have the same culture that has been successful,” said Chen, “but mostly because of customers. We made a lot of promises with our brand … and the promises we made to our customers and all the commitment we will fulfill.”

Sybase’s current platform, Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP), is a mobile enterprise application platform with which SAP BusinessObjects Mobile and SAP NetWeaver Mobile will be integrated. Sybase Mobile Sales for SAP CRM and Sybase Mobile Workflow for SAP Business Suite are already available on SUP through a previous joint venture between SAP and Sybase. In August, Sybase announced that some of its partners, including Bluefin Solutions, T-Systems, msc mobile, and Maihiro, have already launched applications built on SUP for SAP solutions.

As of yet there has been no mention of a licensing model for the new mobile applications, which led one audience member to inquire about it at the press conference. McDermott said the companies have been considering approaches but nothing is final. “This is about customer value,” he said. “Licensing models are a mere reflection of the business outcome and the business benefit that you deliver back to the executive that makes the decision.”

Regarding different payment structures for occasional versus frequent users, he went on to say, “We’ll be smart on the licensing and of course there will be a casual approach to this as well as a power approach to this as there are with conventional user models today.”

Laura Casasanto

Laura Casasanto is a technical editor who served as the managing editor of SCM Expert and Project Expert.

You may contact the author at lauracasasanto@gmail.com.

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