Kevin Benedict Ponders the Future

The Quiet Mobility Company - Sybase

Last March SAP and Sybase(the quiet company) announced a co-innovation partnership to deliver mobility to iPhones, Blackberrys and Windows Mobile devices. Read this excerpt from a March 9, 2009 press release:

"The two companies are co-innovating and collaborating to deliver the new SAP® Business Suite software for the first time to iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and other devices by integrating it with Sybase industry-leading mobile enterprise application platform."

My question is where is Sybase? Why are they so quiet? I see them making record profits and issuing an occasional press release, but where are the mobility evangelists? Gartner ranks them number 1 on their Magic Quadrant, but I see more publicity from 10 person start-ups than from iAnywhere or Sybase. Are they engaged in a skunk works project that will explode onto the mobility market in a gigantic marketing extravaganza like Apple? It seems they like to make these potentially interesting announcements and then return to their quiet cave.

Here is the problem with Sybase's silence. It gives the mobility stage to others. This stage is where thought leaders participate in educating the market. It is where visionaries paint new images of what is possible. Sybase's history and customer base give them an opportunity to take the stage. I just don't see them doing it. IT decision makers will forget about them.

How many of you know the name of a visionary in Sybase's mobility group? I am sure they exist, I just never see them leave the cave. I don't see them taking the center stage and commanding our attention.

Perhaps I am just missing them and they are all around me. Do you see them everywhere and I don't? I read Ian Thain's blog often, but are there other voices from Sybase? I look forward to your comments so I can be pointed in the right direction.

I know Sybase and iAnywhere. I did not know John F Kennedy. They have some great mobile middleware technology, but the market is not going to wait for them to come out of their cave and tell us about it.

I see it in companies that are big and have a long history. Newcomers and young visionaries within the company do not feel empowered to write or speak. They don't feel worthy of taking the podium where the company founders once stood decades before and shared ideas and visions. Why? They always feel they will say something wrong and the founders will jump out of their graves. The result is a quiet company.

***********************************************
Author Kevin Benedict
Independent Mobility Consultant, Wireless Industry Analyst and Marketing Consultant
www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbenedict
twitter: @krbenedict
http://kevinbenedict.ulitzer.com/
http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/
***********************************************

In Remembrance of the PDA

How long has it been since you stopped using the term PDA? It occurred to me the other day that the PDA has played an important part in my career and I should not let it pass away without a ceremony of some sort.

The PDA has been replaced by iEverything and smartphones. However, it was an important gadget that paved the way for the mobile technology advances of today. It opened our minds to the possibilities of keeping on task, even with poor memories. It helped generations of soccer moms remember where each child was dropped off and when they needed to be recovered. It allowed us men to seem organized despite ourselves.

PDAs started the concepts of software applications, music and photos in our pockets. PDAs kicked-off companies like Palm and motivated people like me to begin blogging.

Let us be silent for 30 seconds in rememberance of the PDA. We can quietly bow our heads and reach down into our pockets and try to remember the last place we used our stylus before it disappeared.

***********************************************
Author Kevin Benedict
Independent Mobility Consultant, Wireless Industry Analyst and Marketing Consultant
www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbenedict
twitter: @krbenedict
http://kevinbenedict.ulitzer.com/
http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/
***********************************************

Advice for Mobile Start-Ups: Working with SAP, Part 2

There are several different categories of mobile applications that work with or integrate with SAP.

Those that provide real-time mobile views of complete SAP applications
Those that provide mobile queries and reports on SAP data
Those that provide custom mobile forms for subsets of SAP business processes based upon roles and responsibilities
Complete, disconnected mobile applications (like work orders) that synchronize with a field force automation solution (e.g. Sky Technologies, Sybase, Syclo, ClickSoftware, etc) on the backend where it is integrated with SAP
Custom mobile applications for inspections, assessments, plant maintenance and other niche requirements that may be synchronized with custom databases that are integrated with SAP databases.

It is important to understand which category or categories your solutions fit, and how this impacts your ability to leverage the SAP sales and marketing organizations to help grow your business.

The different categories of mobile solutions and architectures listed above often have different users. A field service technician needs a connected/disconnected mobile application, while the administrator may simply need mobile access to the SAP ERP. You must recognize who your user is before you start marketing. What department's budget will pay for a white collar worker's mobile access? Who are the decision makers? What are their priorities? Is it saving money, making money or doing more with less?

Can you think of other mobile application categories that I missed?

Read Advice to Mobile Start-Ups: Working with SAP, Part 1 here, Part 3 here and Part 4.

***********************************************
Author Kevin Benedict
Independent Mobility Consultant, Wireless Industry Analyst and Marketing Consultant
www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbenedict
twitter: @krbenedict
http://kevinbenedict.ulitzer.com/
http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/
***********************************************

New and Unique Mobile Applications and Business Processes

It seems like everybody can now build a mobile client. I remember when that was a very big deal. Now it is quickly becoming a commodity feature. The value of mobile applications is quickly shifting from the mobile client to the business process that is being mobilized.

Last week I had the opportunity to talk with Chuck Sacco of Movitas. These guys focus on some very interesting and unique business processes in the hospitality markets. They want to help their hotel clients offer time sensitive "distressed inventory" to their guests via mobile devices.

Chuck educated me on the meaning of distressed inventory. Distressed inventory describes open time slots for services. For example, a spa may have open time slots on their schedule. These open time slots are not making any money for the property.

Motivas' solution is designed to be able to notify guests of available services, and even perhaps discounts on services on the property. The purpose is to improve the revenue generating potential of distressed inventory. An unused time slot generates zero money. If you can send out a SMS message to guests that there is a 50% discount on spa treatments between 4:15 PM and 4:45 PM, then you can generate money where there wasn't any. I guess this assumes that guests that were booked at 100% of fees don't reschedule to the 4:15 PM time.... That would be an important configuration feature wouldn't it? Notify only the guests not previously scheduled :-)

The key points are the following:

Saving money or making money for the enterprise customer is the key
Enabling a business process to work no matter the technology
It is not the gadget that is important, but the business results
Deep vertical industry expertise is critical to providing real value
Make it easy on the user ~ push timely information out, don't depend on users to discover
Identify areas of latency, inefficiencies and poor service and fix it in a scalable model

I invite your thoughts and comments.

***********************************************
Author Kevin Benedict
Independent Mobility Consultant, Wireless Industry Analyst and Marketing Consultant
www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbenedict
twitter: @krbenedict
http://kevinbenedict.ulitzer.com/
http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/
***********************************************

Advice to Mobile Start-ups: Working with SAP, Part 1

I was invited to spend time on SAP's rain soaked campus in Palo Alto, California last week and met with people from several different groups to discuss mobile computing, mobile strategies and how mobile start-ups can best partner with SAP. This article reviews some of those discussions.

One of the first points to understand is that SAP LOVES mobility. In December SAP announced that one of their key focuses for 2010 would be mobility. I wrote about SAP's announcement here in December. What this means is SAP is looking for partnerships with mobile software companies that will extend the reach of their core software to more users. Let's talk about what that means.

SAP is one of the largest software companies in the world and traditionally they have focused on selling to the largest global companies. They have been successful in this strategy, but even with their successes, they still have relatively few users in each of their customers' operations. Some estimates have it at about 445 users per customer on average. That may sound like a lot of users, but many of these companies may have tens of thousands of employees.

SAP's strategy now is to look for solutions and partnerships that will expand the value of their core systems to employees within their customers' operations that are not traditionally SAP users. This is a key point for mobile software companies to understand.

If you imagine the glassy surface of a pond and how it looks when a rock is thrown into it. The rock lands with a splash and a series of circles form. The inner circle is the smallest and represents SAP's current users within an enterprise. Each surrounding circle is bigger and covers a wider area and represents more possible users. These are the circles SAP wants to move into and where they want to add value. If you, as a mobile software company, can help them do that, then they are interested.

Let's explore how to expand the circles. What do we need to know?

Who needs access to SAP system data, but is not sitting in a cubicle with SAP access today?
Who collects SAP system data that is not currently a SAP user? They may be collecting data on paper forms today and re-keying the data into SAP at another time.
Who are the mobile employees at a SAP customer? What are their roles and what data do they need to view and collect while on the road?
What supervisors need access to SAP anywhere and at anytime?
What managers need SAP management reports while on the road?
Is there SAP system data that needs to be shared externally with extended multi-enterprise supply chains via mobile devices? You don't want your supply chain partners to view all of your system data, but are there alerts, updates, reports, etc., that should be shared via mobile devices?
Should the logistics department have mobile "proof-of-delivery" applications in the hands of their truck drivers?
Should plant maintenance managers have mobile inspection applications that feed SAP?
Should service technicians be using mobile service tickets that feed SAP or an SAP partner's work order management system?
One SAP customer has over 600 food processing inspectors worldwide. This inspection data needed to be collected and stored centrally. While this may not be a core SAP application, it shows that SAP customers often have a large number of mobile data collection requirements that can be turned into management reports and provided to traveling managers.

All of these applications are adding new users to the SAP family. If you can add new users to the SAP family, then you will have the ear of the entire SAP sales organization.

Part 2 of this series can be found here, Part 3 here and part 4.

If you would like to discuss this subject in more detail please email me here. If you would like to follow my discussions and be alerted to new Mobile Strategies for Businesses' articles, then you can add me to your RSS reader or twitter account @krbenedict.