Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms, SAP and Marketing

Yesterday I was reading Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms. It was interesting to me that one of the points Gartner considers before including a MEAP vendor in their report is marketing. They consider the following:

1. Success at marketing (I am guessing it is measured by sales?)
2. Market awareness (name recognition within a target market)
3. Marketing strategy (if Gartner is convinced you have a good strategy)
4. Your ability to recruit a good partner ecosystem and support it through marketing

Think about it. You invest millions of dollars and tens of thousands of man/woman hours into your products, middleware, synchronization technologies, SAP integration methodologies, databases, device management dashboards, rapid application development environments and multi-channel support for dozens of mobile devices, but that is not enough. Gartner is going to evaluate your marketing before including you in their report.

Gartner understands what many smart engineers have not yet learned. A better mouse trap does not sell itself or pay the expenses - sales do. Unless a comprehensive marketing plan is designed, developed and successfully implemented you will not gain sufficient mind share and market share quick enough to remain viable in this fast changing market.

It almost seems like SAP is holding a marketing Olympics for their mobility partners. They have chosen to partner with a handful of companies like Sky Technologies, Syclo, Sybase, RIM and ClickSoftware. Many of these companies have overlapping mobility solutions, but SAP seems to want to invite their partners to compete on the marketing field and see which one comes out on top.

I enjoy a good game of strategy. Although, I can feel the pain that passionate software engineers must feel. They have dedicated their life to developing a progammer's MEAP masterpiece, but the winner is determined by the folks in the marketing department with the expense accounts and travel budgets.


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Author Kevin Benedict
Mobility Consultant, Wireless Industry Analyst and Web 2.0 Marketing Expert

http://www.netcentric-strategies.com/
www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbenedict
twitter: http://twitter.com/krbenedict
http://kevinbenedict.ulitzer.com/
http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/

***Full Disclosure: I am a mobility consultant and Web 2.0 marketing expert and as such I work with, and have worked with, some of the companies mentioned in my articles.
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AT&T FamilyMap App Treating Your Kids Like a Truck

AT&T has announced the release of their new application called AT&T FamilyMap App. It is a GPS vehicle tracking solution, except it is attached to your kids. Rather than mounting a GPS unit under the dashboard of your vehicle, it is inserted into your child's pocket or backpack.

Fleet managers (i.e. moms and dads) can logon to a website to see the locations of their kids, monitor their comings and goings and time spent at each location. In this article I describe why fleet managers use these applications, but I am not sure I want to attempt to describe why a parent would use it. I have my own kids that just might stumble across this article.

In this article I wrote several months ago, I provided a list of 39 reasons a business might want to invest in GPS fleet tracking. However, I need your help coming up with a list of similar reasons parents should invest in GPS kid tracking.

I look forward to your comments.

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Author Kevin Benedict
Mobility Consultant, Wireless Industry Analyst and Web 2.0 Marketing Consultant

http://www.netcentric-strategies.com/
www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbenedict
twitter: http://twitter.com/krbenedict
http://kevinbenedict.ulitzer.com/
http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/

***Full Disclosure: I am a mobility and Web 2.0 marketing consultant and as such I work with, and have worked with, some of the companies mentioned in my articles.
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Mobile Strategy Seminar - Sky Technologies

I came across this announcement today and it is likely to be of interest to many of you. With more than 10 years of experience in Mobilizing SAP with customers in 60 countries.Sky Technologies have developed a mobile framework that manages all mobile applications within your existing SAP system

Join us on February 18th to learn how to design a mobile strategy that will support your business needs today and will evolve to support your business needs of tomorrow.

In this seminar, you will learn how to:

• Define your own mobile strategy
• Realize the benefits of adopting a mobile framework inside your SAP landscape
• Understand the skills and resource required
• Identify which applications to mobilze for optimum efficiency
• Avoid solutions that provide partial mobile device support
• Advantages of middleware-free solutions

Register Today to ensure you hear the latest information on SAP mobility solutions.

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Author Kevin Benedict
Independent Mobility Consultant, Wireless Industry Analyst and Web 2.0 Marketing Consultant
www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbenedict
twitter: http://twitter.com/krbenedict
http://kevinbenedict.ulitzer.com/
http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/

***Full Disclosure: I am a mobility consultant and Web 2.0 marketing expert and as such I work with, and have worked with, many of the companies mentioned in my blogs.
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iPhones, Satellites, DVRs and Home Breakins

One month ago: We were half way across town driving to a friend's house to watch the Boise State football team take on TCU in the Fiesta Bowl when I remembered that I had not programmed our DVR to record the game for posterity. I reluctantly confessed this to my wife. She pondered which of our neighbors we could call to break into our house and schedule our DVR to record it. We ultimately decided to just buy the DVD of the game, since teaching our neighbors to breakin to our home did not seem prudent.

Today: I discovered that DirecTV has an iPhone application that enables you to access your DVR account and manage your recordings remotely! OK, I am not the first to discover this, it seems I am user 1,000,001.

It is very intriguing to me, that I can be sitting in Starbuck's while sending a programming request from my iPhone up into outer space where it hits a circling satellite and bounces back down to my satellite dish, travels on a cable from my roof to my living room and programs the DRV box. I started bouncing requests up and down like a basketball. My wife and daughter could not believe dad learned how to program the DVR.

Never again will we need to ask a neighbor to break into our home to program our DVR.

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Author Kevin Benedict
Independent Mobility Consultant, Wireless Industry Analyst and Web 2.0 Marketing Consultant
www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbenedict
twitter: http://twitter.com/krbenedict
http://kevinbenedict.ulitzer.com/
http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/

***Full Disclosure: I am a mobility and Web 2.0 marketing consultant and as such I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned here.
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Advice for Mobile Start-Ups: Working with SAP, Part 3

Mobile micro-apps seem to be the hot topic now days at SAP. These are small mobile applications for iPhones, Android, Blackberry and Windows mobile. These applications can be limited and provide access to one part of one SAP application and business process, or expose an entire business process. For example, travel requests and expense report approvals can be part of a business process that is exposed in a mobile micro-apps.

In the case of an Expense Report approval, a manager can be alerted to an expense report that needs approved before it can be paid. The manager can access the report through the micro-app on his/her iPhone, review it and approve or reject it. There is not much to these applications, but they are novel today and will continue to evolve into more powerful mobile applications.

SAP has some big ambitions about adding mobile users to their systems. They are encouraging these kind of mobile micro-applications to extend functionality to more users. They would even like to see ways that consumers (i.e. the masses) could access appropriate and relevant business processes within SAP systems -think tracking shipments, ordering products, checking University schedules, interacting with financial services companies, etc, on mobile devices.

Here are a few of the challenges with mobile micro-applications that should be considered:

• How do you manage mobile micro-apps in a large enterprise?
• Since mobile micro-apps can be developed for just about any part of any SAP business process there could quickly be dozens or even hundreds of mobile micro-apps springing up.
• Does the enterprise open the doors to supporting all popular mobile devices, or does the enterprise try to standardize so micro-apps can be easier for IT to manage?
• Many mobile micro-app vendors are considering SaaS business models. This means mobile micro-app users could be expensing these costs, rather than running them through a formal budget process. Is that a problem? Who approves it?
• What criteria is the IT department of a large enterprise going to use in order to select quality mobile micro-app vendors? By their nature mobile micro-apps can be developed by very small software development companies without a lot of experience or infrastructure.
• Some vendors of mobile micro-apps provide application development environments that enable non-programmers to develop mobile micro-apps. This is very cool, but now you have the potential of business users importing and exporting data from SAP database systems. Some DBAs would have a problem with that.
• I can see the scenario where an SAP user downloads and installs 5 different mobile micro-apps onto their device. If these micro-apps were from different vendors, there could be 5 different GUIs, different mobile middleware involved, different security systems, different integration methodologies, etc.

I love the idea of mobile micro-apps that provide the mobile workforce with access to appropriate SAP business processes for the purpose of working more efficiently. The point of this article is not to deter mobile micro-app vendors or enterprises from implementing them, but simply to suggest there are a few things that should be considered.

One strategy is to use a MEAP, mobile enterprise application platform. MEAPs provide a framework for managing many different mobile applications using a standardized methodology, using standardized development environments, standardized security, standardized synchronization methodologies, standardized integration processes and leveraging application code across multiple mobile devices. An example of a MEAP is Sky Technologies.

This article is part of a series entitled Advice for Mobile Start-Ups: Working with SAP. Part 1 and 2 of this series can be found at the links below:

Advice for Mobile Start-Ups: Working with SAP, Part 1

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

Advice for Mobile Start-Ups: Working with SAP, Part 4
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Author Kevin Benedict
Independent Mobility Consultant, Wireless Industry Analyst and Marketing Consultant
www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbenedict
twitter: http://twitter.com/krbenedict
http://kevinbenedict.ulitzer.com/
http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/
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