When Mobility Is Not About Mobility

Where is the value in a mobile application?  Today, at the SAP Influencer Summit, Prashant Chatterjee with Sybase, an SAP company, hinted at an answer.  He said the value mobile software developers need to bring to the SAP mobile ecosystem is vertical industry knowledge.  The value of a mobile application is found in its ability to support very specific business and industry processes.

The ability to integrate and automate best practices and rich content into mobile applications is powerful.  No one is looking for vendors that can simply build screens on a mobile device.  They want intelligent mobile applications, with deep industry expertise architected into it and integration into core business software systems and database content.

Prashant gave an example of an oil refinery environment.  He said there are very unique requirements for enterprise asset management in an oil refinery and in the management of pipelines.  These unique requirements, supported by a mobile application, would be a great vertical niche market.

An example of a mobility solution vendor is Syclo, a co-innovation partner of SAP.  They have tightly integrated their mobile applications with the SAP enterprise asset management solutions to provide this industry support.

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Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, SAP Top Contributor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst
Phone +1 208-991-4410
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Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility consultant, mobility analyst, writer and Web 2.0 marketing professional. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.