| By Kevin Benedict | Article Rating: |
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| April 11, 2012 04:00 AM EDT | Reads: |
3,342 |
WARNING! These are Kevin Benedict's personal thoughts and opinions pondered over a cup of my favorite coffee shop's bowl of soul on the outdoor patio in the warm spring sunshine of Boise, Idaho.
My first thought when I received the news that SAP is acquiring Syclo, was, "Smart move SAP!" I respect the fact that SAP is willing to double down on enterprise mobility. I also respect the fact that SAP is willing to brave the inevitable criticism for having bought the same solution twice. SAP has smart leaders. They have made an aggressive and brave decision with this acquisition. I think they recognized an unmet need, estimated the impact, valued the market and fixed it. I am sure this was not an easy decision. It will raise many questions, but I am sure it will make Sapphire 2012 even more interesting (perhaps even more than Van Halen in concert).
SAP has doubled down on enterprise mobility, while Oracle is still not even in the game. I find it fascinating that the SAP leadership has a vision and is charging ahead while Oracle is on the sidelines. How curious.
SAP thought they were getting all of the features that Syclo offers (MEAP, SDK, production ready mobile apps, experience, talent, etc.) when they bought Sybase in 2010. However, once they had critically examined Sybase post-acquisition, they realized there were gaps. Mainly, they spent $5.8 billion, in large part to gain a mobile solution, but then realized there were no batteries included (i.e. mobile apps).
Syclo, on the other hand, offers not only a mobile middleware platform (some say it is better than SUP), but has many industry proven, in production, mobile applications. These are real mobile apps. Apps that can transform companies and give them competitive advantages. These are mobile apps that husky men and women with five o'clock shadows wearing uniforms use to build national electrical grids and other important infrastructure components.
Not only does Syclo offer a library of "real" mobile applications that are in production, but they bring desperately needed enterprise mobility skills, real customers and a passion for mobility to the SAP family.
Let's get back to the subject of mobile enterprise application platforms (MEAPs). When SAP announced the acquisition of Sybase in 2010, I detected mostly unspoken frustration in the eyes of the Syclo management team when I interviewed them about the acquisition. I believe they felt their MEAP was better than Sybase's. It will now be interesting to see which MEAP wins out in the long term. Yes, I know that Syclo has announced that their solutions will now run on SUP, but I think they agreed to this mostly under duress.
Syclo's SDK is designed to produce "real" production ready mobile apps, not just partial code for programmers. I know of many large deployments of production mobile apps from Syclo. Syclo has earned their stripes, and now SAP and SAP customers will benefit from this.
The biggest complaint about SAP mobility has now been addressed - the lack of production quality, real mobile applications being used by happy customers. It will now be very interesting to see how the SAP mobility stack, stacks up.
The inventory and options for developing mobile solutions has now jumped up another notch. It was already a challenge to figure out the best way to design, develop, integrate, deploy and support a mobile solution. Now, instead of having hundreds of different ways to build a mobile solution in the SAP world, there will be more. It will be interesting to watch how SAP works to simplify their message given so many possible ways mobile apps can be implemented.
SAP will now have the Sybase Unwired Platform, Agentry 6.0 and Smart Mobile Suite from Syclo, Sybase 365, NetWeaver Gateway and all of the other SAP ecosystem partners. Things will get interesting!
I know the management team at Syclo and value their passion, expertise, perseverance and talent. They have not always been the flashiest company, some even drive Smart cars, but they have demonstrated their value by quietly deploying thousands and thousands of real mobile applications around the world in production environments and making customers happy.
Now comes other challenges for SAP. How do they merge and consolidate so many good mobile solutions that may not always be compatible with each other? Will these solutions be adequate for B2C (business to consumer) apps, or is that a unique category that requires a different acquisition or internal development effort? I know Syclo has been evangelizing their B2C apps for the past few months. This is a recent push and it will be interesting to see how it holds up under more scrutiny.
How will SAP manage relationships with important partners like ClickSoftware which also has a powerful and competing enterprise mobility solutions called ClickMobile. SAP private labels a ClickSoftware solution called, SAP Workforce Scheduling and Optimization by ClickSoftware. It has its own mobile client. Again, this will be interesting to watch.
Does the Syclo acquisition enhance mobility in the cloud? I am not sure.
I love enterprise mobility, and its a good thing because now my coffee is cold.
P.S. I reserve the right to change all of my opinions when SAP calls and yells at me :-)
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Published April 11, 2012 Reads 3,342
Copyright © 2012 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.
More Stories By Kevin Benedict
Kevin Benedict is an enterprise mobility analyst, mobile strategy consultant, writer, speaker and SAP Mentor Alumnus. Follow him on Twitter @krbenedict. He is a popular speaker around the world on the topic of enterprise mobility. He maintains a busy schedule writing and speaking at events in North America, Asia and Europe. He has over 22 years of experience working with enterprise software applications and has built a mobile enterprise software company from the ground up that experienced 100% year-over-year growth for 4 straight years.
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With Cloud Expo New York | 12th Cloud Expo [June 10-13, 2013] hurtling towards us, let's take a look at the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference coming up June 10-13 at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City.
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The new open source cloud orchestration platform called OpenStack is the promise of flexible network virtualization, and network overlays are looking closer than ever. The vision of this platform is to enable the on-demand creation of many distinct networks on top of one underlying physical infrastructure in the cloud environment. The platform will support automated provisioning and management of large groups of virtual machines or compute resources, including extensive monitoring in the cloud.
In his session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Dave Eichorn, Global Data Center Practice Head at Zensar, will share a case study describing how a utility services company handled the migration of its Microsoft platform to the cloud. Challenged with the time-consuming task of opening operations out of temporary offices, this company struggled with the need to simultaneously access data that was accumulated from a vast amount of data-intensive jobs. Zensar migrated the company’s application ...
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In her session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Niki Acosta, Cloud Evangelista for Rackspace, will talk thro...
The rise of cloud computing has exposed hard drive-based storage as the new data center bottleneck. Combating this, data center managers have deployed SSDs to gain the performance needed to provide real-time access to data. However, due to budget constraints, many have turned to consumer-grade SSDs without understanding that they wear out quickly when processing enterprise workloads. In this session, Esther Spanjer will discuss recent endurance advancements in SSD technology that enable usage of...
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Wowrack’s core expertise lies in high-availability Private and Public Cloud IaaS Hosting Solutions. Wowrack provides a true Hybrid service – where business release all IT management and hardware provisioning – taking the data center and server system administrative headaches off our customer’s shoulders. ...
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