Following reports that SAP would close off mainstream maintenance on its on-premise SAP Mobile Platform at the end of 2020, prompted by a blog post by senior product manager Martin Grasshoff, the vendor has moved to clarify its position on the future of the service.

In both a statement released by SAP and in a revised blog post by Grasshoff customers were encouraged to move to SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services for mobile app development and delivery, but the vendor moved away from discussing a specific end-date for maintenance.

Mobility is very important to SAP, and as such, new mobile investments will be heavily focused on SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services, including innovations in the SDK for iOS, enhancements to the new micro app creation tool and investment in the new low-code, visual mobile app development feature.

The company said it will continue to deliver incremental quality enhancements to customers’ existing on-premise investments in Sap Mobile Platform per SAP terms and conditions. All customers with active maintenance agreements can expect the SAP Mobile Platform to be supported per SAP guidelines.

Create a Sound Mobile Strategy

Cost-effective solution to deliver multi-channel, enterprise-grade apps without requiring resource or infrastructure re-engineering

1. Ensure industry-standard security and company governance policies are maintained for mobile
2. Accelerate projects with the broadest set of services available in the cloud and on-premise

Maximize Productivity

1. Reduce app development times using code-less integration tooling, and SDKs for native, hybrid, SMS and MDD apps
2. Allow developers to focus on the user experience design and business logic by providing components and services for authentication, encryption, parsing, remote logging control and more
3. Leverage existing skillsets by allowing developers to use their preferred tooling
4. Simplify talent souring through support for open-standards, open-source projects and industry-standard IDEs
5. Build the right app for the use case with support for native, hybrid, mobile web, SMS and MDD app architectures
6. Streamline app discovery and updates  with Mobile Place integration and automatic hybrid app update

 SAP and Mobility

SAP’s mobile strategy is certainly a departure from the strategies we assume with SAP

Mobile Security

The first key area is mobile security for employees to do any enterprise work using Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and corporate-owned devices. SAP Mobile includes a portfolio of security products around MDM and the mobile app management space.

Platform

The platform play by SAP Mobile is another key element of the SAP Mobile portfolio. It’s around the notion that you need a common runtime environment for all the applications, whether it be for integration, services, policy implementation, or multi-device support. That’s where the technology and IT is to make that easy so your incremental investments in additional applications can be done very quickly and easily.

1-Applications

 The next is our set of applications. The applications that are traditional to SAP are there, but we see a new wave of applications that are increasingly leveraging mobile to transform our thoughts around what an application should be. It’s important to note that SAP stopped looking at apps as an inside/out process. SAP has broken from the established franchise focus they’ve traditionally held with their ERP and CRM applications with a new focus on open standard and technology agnostic back ends.

2-Mobile messaging

 SAP also has its own mobile messaging portfolio based on an SMS messaging infrastructure. We are able to participate in the global exchange of the SMS network, which allows us access to 99.8% of the mobile devices that are provisioned on this planet. SAP sees messaging as a common denominator, with use cases like pushing an invite to download applications and sending the password reset information to a known device.

3-Cloud

Finally, we have the cloud. The way we see mobile and cloud is not mutually exclusive. As a matter of fact, often mobile is spoken together in the same context of cloud, most of our large deals have a multi-backend requirement, and the reason for that is they are enabling a life of specific individuals. They want to enable the sales team to be entirely mobile. For that, they need to enable ERP and CRM, which may not necessarily be SAP.

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