Welcome!

Cloud Expo Authors: Denise Dubie, Liz McMillan, Elizabeth White, Mark van Rijmenam, Patrick Pushor

Related Topics: Wireless, SOA & WOA, SAP, Cloud Expo

Wireless: Blog Feed Post

SAP Acquires Syclo - A First Analysis Over Coffee

SAP has doubled down on enterprise mobility, while Oracle is still not even in the game

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 :-)

*************************************************************

Kevin Benedict, Independent Mobile Industry Analyst, Consultant and SAP Mentor Alumnus
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility analyst, consultant and blogger. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

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.

Comments (0)

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.


Cloud Expo Breaking News
“Cloud has everything to do with what has happened with Big Data,” explained Jason Deck, Director of Strategic Alliances at Logicworks, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “Big Data doesn’t exist in its easily accessible way without cloud. From reduced startup costs, to cheap storage, to fast processing, to adequate security, to the easy incorporation of third-party analytics tools, cloud made Big Data accessible to customers of all sizes, with all different bud...
“Social, mobile, analytics and cloud can’t be looked at as distinct technology trends; they are facets of the same movement and an everyday reality for consumers and businesses alike,” said Craig Sowell, IBM VP of SmartCloud Marketing, in this exclusive Q&A with Cloud Expo Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan. “This means that businesses need to start looking at trends as one: cloud is the delivery, analytics is the unique insight, social is a shareable service, and mobile is the ubiquitous access.” ...
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. We have technical and strategy sessions for you all four days dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, wha...
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 ...
At pennies per virtual machine-hour, the economics of cloud computing are both compelling and daunting to replicate. Whether you are building your own cloud infrastructure, building a public cloud or choosing a cloud service, there are key strategy and technology decisions that make the difference between success and failure. In his General Session at the 12th International Cloud Expo, Jason Waxman, VP in the Intel Architecture Group and general manager of the Cloud Platforms Group within Inte...
You're getting pitched every day from your legacy enterprise software and hardware vendors about "cloud." They're doing an amazing job of convincing your CIO and CTO about what cloud is and how you should use it. The reality is they're defending their shrinking market share and keeping you on the legacy treadmill for as long as they can by selling you solutions that aren't "cloud." 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...
SYS-CON Events announced today that Wowrack will exhibit at SYS-CON's 12th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 10–13, 2013, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York. 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. ...
Organizations across the world are increasingly starting to see the benefits of moving more and more services to the cloud. The focus on the cost-saving potential of cloud is rapidly shifting to completely transforming the business with cloud. As organizations are investing enormous sums on technology they are starting to realize that in order to maximize the return on investment and accelerate the business transformation process the first area of focus should be people. By ensuring the organiza...