As leading companies increasingly adopt a mobile-first strategy when it comes to developing applications and enabling business processes, the choice of mobile development platform is becoming both critical and strategic.
“Given the importance of choosing the right mobile platform, we decided to conduct a SWOT analysis of the three leading mobile platforms, as identified by Gartner,” says Geoffrey Marutla, a consultant with Barnstone’s SAP Managed Mobility Division team. “The analysis clearly shows that SAP Mobile Platform not only has its own unique strengths but also can match the strengths identified for the other two platforms.”
According to Barnstone’s analysis, although the SAP Mobile Platform has been developed with the primary objective of creating an environment to support any mobile application development framework, it is also very well suited to support Fiori, SAP’s range of mobile application user interfaces. Fiori is designed for the SAP ERP user base and, best of all, is free to existing SAP customers.
Pricing in general is highly competitive, Marutla says. The price of SAP Mobile Platform has come down by around 50 percent over the last while, and the price per licence reduces the more licences a company buys.
“This is very important as mobility becomes more and more entrenched as the business model of the future,” notes Nicolette Carvalho, who manages the Barnstone Managed Mobility Division. “The fact that the price reduces as more licences are purchased makes the productivity and customer-service benefits of mobility more accessible to companies, and helps them leverage their existing SAP investment.”
As noted above, SAP Mobile Platform is designed to enable the development of apps for today’s hybrid mobile environments. As the BYOD (bring your own device) phenomenon has shown, companies have to accommodate employees’ choice of mobile devices, and hence a wide range of mobile operating systems.
The same logic applies to the apps they develop, whether for employees or customers – interoperability is key to success in the mobile world.
The Barnstone team was also impressed at the way in which new features have been rolled out. For one thing, service packs for the software development kit will have separate release cycles to the server service packs in an effort to keep developers current with the latest iterations of the various mobile device platforms. For example, a Windows Software Development Kit was recently released to support .Net development.
When it comes to the server version, SAP Mobile Platform is well served with frequent updates. Service packs 4 and 5 have contained many exciting upgrades too, among them the integration of Ultralite and Mobilink (Sybase legacy products) to support heavier data flow.
“Building on the legacy of Sybase, SAP has done a great job of creating a highly affordable mobile platform that enables the borderless enterprise of the future, and extends its core enterprise-grade technology into this new business model,” says Marutla. “The only thing we are missing is a clearer mobility road map from SAP.”