Kevin Benedict Ponders the Future

Kevin's Mobile Retailing News Weekly - November 16, 2010

Kevin's Mobile Retailing News Weekly is an online newsletter that is made up of the most interesting news, articles and links related to mobile retailing applications, mobile payments and mobile marketing applications that I run across each week. I am specifically targeting market size and market trend information.

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At its second annual developer conference, PayPal announced the release of Mobile Express Checkout, a platform that will allow customers to pay for retail products in stores using only their mobile phones.

http://blogs.forbes.com/moneybuilder/2010/10/26/paypal-wants-you-to-ditch-your-wallet/

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Retailers are wising up to the trend in mobile coupons, according to a recent report by IHL Group and RetailConnections. Many are set to implement systems that will allow them to deliver coupons directly to a consumer's mobile phone.

http://www.bizreport.com/2010/11/54-of-retailers-to-put-m-coupon-systems-in-place-in-next-12.html

Mobile Expert Interview Series: Sybase's Willie Jow, Part 3

This is Part 3 of my interview with Willie Jow, vice president of mobility product marketing with Sybase.

Kevin: I have had SIs (systems integrators) calling me this week asking if I know where they can find experienced SUP (Sybase Unwired Platform) developers that they can add to their practice. It appears there is a big and growing demand. What are you going to do to help train, support and certify developers on SUP?

Willie: We have a phased approach. Within Sybase we have been training systems integrators for many years. We have already trained a number of SAP systems integrators on how to customize mobile CRM by using SUP. Our immediate focus is on training internal SAP folks on our solutions. We have been very busy for the past 90 days and have had great reception and results. This same training will soon be available to our systems integrators. We have a lot of plans underway for training.

Kevin: A few weeks ago I asked Vishal (SAP Board Member) what his advice was to companies and systems integrators that need a mobile strategy today. He said the "clean" answer is to get trained on SUP and use that as the platform for all mobile applications. My question to you is if that was the "clean" answer, what is the "dirty" answer?

Mobile Expert Interview Series: Sybase's Willie Jow, Part 1

Willie Jow, vice president of mobility product marketing with Sybase, was gracious enough to let me interview him about the latest developments in enterprise mobility at Sybase, an SAP company.

Note: The words in this interview are not always Willie Jow's exact words. I have condensed many of my questions and his responses to make them more concise for the reader.

Kevin: Willie, how does Sybase, which is known for its databases and mobile middleware solutions, become a mobile applications company?

Willie: It is true we are best known for our mobile middleware, and that our history has been focused on supporting channels like ISV, OEM and other kinds of partnerships that delivered the mobile applications. However, a couple of years ago SAP approached us about working on the mobile CRM application. We accepted this opportunit,y and when we completed the mobile application it was very well received by SAP and customers. We now have a great deal of experience developing mobile applications for SAP.

Mobile Expert Interview Series: Sybase's Willie Jow, Part 2

This is Part 2 of my interview with Sybase's Willie Jow, vice president of mobility product marketing with Sybase.

Kevin: Tell me about the announced mobile SDK. Where will the SAP/Sybase SDK stop and the native development environments start?

Willie: That is still being finalized even as we speak. The target date for release is Sapphire 2011.

It is important to note that there are two different kinds of applications, 1) native applications like the CRM and field service apps, and 2) the container approach. The container is on the device, and we populate it with data. Our workflow app is a container application. However, our mobile CRM is a native app. Both will exist and be supported in the SDK.

Kevin: What do you mean by “container?”

Willie: Think of it like an application sitting on your mobile device using native features and code. However, it has no business logic, or data elements. We push data to the container. It is for simple queries and data collection. Our SAP workflow apps fit this model, like travel approvals or discount approval. We push the data to the mobile container application. We see HTML 5 also in this area and are evaluating.

Kevin's Mobility News Weekly - November 11, 2010

Kevin's Mobility News Weekly is an online newsletter made up of the most interesting news and articles related to enterprise mobility that I run across each week. I am specifically targeting information that reflects market numbers and trends.

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Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and chief executive, said 200 million people now access Facebook through its mobile application, a threefold increase since last year.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2010/11/facebook-opens-up-about-mobile-strategy-unveils-new-deals-program.html

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Kicking a boot into RIM's side, Dell announced all 25,000 employees will be given Dell Venue Pros running WP7 in exchange for their BlackBerrys, but they're also offering a new service to their clients for help switching from BlackBerry.

http://m.gizmodo.com/5682309/dell-were-kicking-[blackberry]-out

I have been corrected by SAP on several points since I published this article earlier today. This is the revised and corrected edition.

This is my understanding of how the SAP/Sybase mobility business unit is now organized. The Mobile Business unit will be under John Chen and it has three main groups:

Mobile Platform – led by Billy Ho
Mobile Apps – led by Bob Stutz
Mobile Services – led by Marty Beard

Terry Stepien, will also report to John Chen and lead the Mobile Business unit's managed mobility efforts through the various MNOs (mobile network operators) and ODMs. Willie Jow will be responsible for supporting sales.

I understand that eventually Kevin Nix's team will also move to Bob Stutz's group.

If I have any of this wrong, please correct me.

Thanks,
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Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, SAP Top Contributor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst
Phone +1 208-991-4410
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join SAP Enterprise Mobility on Linkedin:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=2823585&trk=anet_ug_grppro

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.

Kevin's M2M News Weekly - November 10, 2010

Welcome to Kevin's M2M News Weekly, an online newsletter that consists of the most interesting news and articles related to M2M (machine to machine) and embedded mobile devices that I read each week. I aggregate the information, include the original links and add a synopsis of each article. I also search for the latest market numbers such as market size, growth and trends in and around the M2M market.

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M2M represents both a new set of uses for mobile technology and a new source of revenue for mobile operators, and Sprint is aggressively investing in this area.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/208875/sprint_pursues_mobile_m2m_craze.html

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The emergence of mobile health - or mHealth - presents a new opportunity to enhance disease prevention and management by allowing health related data collection beyond the traditional bounds of the clinic or hospital.

http://www.cellular-news.com/story/46273.php

Kevin's Mobile Retailing News Weekly - November 9, 2010

Kevin's Mobile Retailing News Weekly is an online newsletter that is made up of the most interesting news, articles and links related to mobile retailing applications, mobile payments and mobile marketing applications that I run across each week. I am specifically targeting market size and market trend information.

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Amazon.com just made an interesting upgrade to its iPhone mobile shopping app. Users of the iPhone 4 and iPhone 3Gs running iOS 4 can now scan a barcode on a product and instantly get matching product and pricing information from Amazon's catalog.

http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/10/amazon_adds_barcode_scanning_to_iphone_shopping_app.html

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Savvy apparel retailers are having no trouble wrapping their heads (and dollars) around mobile friendly sites and apps as a way to boost revenue and connect with consumers.

http://www.bnet.com/blog/publishing-style/how-fashion-brands-can-make-the-most-of-m-commerce/937

Report from Last Week's ClickConnect North America 2010 on Enterprise Mobility

I had the opportunity to attend ClickSoftware's user conference for a couple of days last week in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was at the Royal Palm, a beautiful resort located in an orange grove. I was able to meet with many large utility customers and large field services organizations and spend some quality time with Shawn McEwan from Sybase and interview many of the executives from ClickSoftware.

Sybase an SAP company, was attending in support of their recently announced partnership with ClickSoftware who is utilizing the Sybase Mobility Platform in their solutions. Terry Stepien, president, Sybase iAnywhere attended and spoke at the conference. Here are some of his comments on the partnership, “By implementing ClickSoftware’s mobile applications on components of the Sybase mobility platform, the service industry benefits from an integrated offering from two industry leaders; proven mobility infrastructure from Sybase and proven mobile applications from ClickSoftware. This partnership will transform ClickSoftware’s customers through highly productive enterprise mobility solutions. We look forward to growing this partnership into 2011 and beyond.”

I spent time at the CIO Council last week with Kris Muller in product marketing with Salesforce.com. He was at the CIO conference speaking about Salesforce.com's new solution called Chatter. Here is the official description of Chatter from Salesforce.com:

Chatter is a brand-new way to collaborate with people at work. Where the status of important projects and deals are automatically pushed to you — so you're always in the loop.

Share securely and collaborate instantly
Stay on top of what matters most
Gain insight and make smarter decisions

I am a big fan of mobile knowledge management and collaboration tools and this fits right in. It is a secure way for all members of a sales team (account reps, pre-sales, product marketing, product management, sales management, etc.) to closely follow developments on a specific account. The team can quickly and securely share information, deal documents, collateral and discussions.

JiWire, Mobile Check-In and Mobile Retailing Applications

I was a guest speaker at the CIO Council 2010 sponsored by Panorama Capital in Las Vegas last week. I was able to spend a couple of days with a number of high tech entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and a leading edge group of industry CIOs. The main focus of the conference this year was enterprise mobility.

One of the most interesting discussion tracks at the conference was the increasing role that WiFi may have as MNOs (mobile network operators) increasingly have bandwidth problems. There are more companies looking to add hotspots, expand coverage and other related services. One of these companies is JiWire.

Enterprise mobility is a term often used in the context of remote and traveling workers, but it can also be used for situations inside the four walls of a manufacturing plant. This article explores the use of enterprise mobility solutions within the four walls of a plant using SAP.

First, let's review what SAP says about their "Perfect Plant" initiative. SAP is enabling companies to create a framework for the “Perfect Plant” by integrating planning, asset management and execution with real-time visibility. As a result, manufacturing networks are more agile, responsive and operationally efficient with SAP solutions. Manufacturers embarking upon the journey towards a “Perfect Plant” gain visibility into all aspects of manufacturing operations, providing the ability to respond faster and minimize impact to the business and bottom line, driving increased yields, asset utilization and order fulfillment. The “Perfect Plant” is the ultimate goal for manufacturers looking to optimize utilization of their manufacturing assets and drive increased production performance in concert with enterprise objectives.

Mobile Retailing and NFC - Near Field Communications

The host of our CIO Council, Chris Albinson of Panorama Capital, today predicted that within one year mobile money will be on everyone's radar. I asked for more details from several experts over dinner this evening and they predicted that iPhone 5 will have embedded NFC (near field communication) chips. Google will announce mobile payment strategies, and so will other big players in the mobile money space like PayPal. NFC are chips that can communicate personal data when they touch POS (point of sale) sensors.

What does this mean for enterprises in the retail space? Who knows! All I know is that everything from POS systems, to banking systems, EDI transactions and credit and debit card systems will be impacted. Your smartphone will likely become your wallet. The chip in the smartphone will uniquely identify you and provide you with the ability to pay for all kinds of things by just touching your smartphone to a counter top sensor.

Mobile Payments and the Mobile Money Ecosystem

More from last week's CIO Council. Chris Albinson from Panorama Capital shared his predictions that mobile payments and location-based services are going to be the two hottest areas of enterprise mobility in 2011.

Others at the event shared that they expect smartphones will soon be available with a specific NFC (near field communications) chip that will enable your phone to be used for mobile money. The chip will be uniquely tied to you and your bank account in a secure way.

I also heard rumors that Apple may soon launch a mobile money capability through iTunes. Just rumors now, but I can easily image Steve Jobs transforming banking through iTunes and everything "i".

Kevin's Mobility News Weekly - November 4, 2010

Kevin's Mobility News Weekly is an online newsletter made up of the most interesting news and articles related to enterprise mobility that I run across each week. I am specifically targeting information that reflects market numbers and trends.

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AT&T announced Thursday a new practice area and portfolio called AT&T ForHealth, which will develop wireless, networked, and cloud-based solutions for the healthcare industry.

http://vator.tv/news/2010-11-04-at-t-announces-new-health-division

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Gold-Mobile, a leading provider of Mobile Enterprise CRM Solutions, and Howard University unveiled a new mobile student, faculty and alumni engagement platform as a part of Howard’s 2010 Homecoming Celebration.

http://www.prlog.org/11035234-howard-university-launches-advanced-mobile-solution-for-higher-education-with-gold-mobile.html

Custom Mobile Applications for the Enterprise

When I was managing a mobile applications company a few years ago, our entire market was SMEs (small to medium sized enterprises). In over half the mobile application development projects that we worked on there was NO existing backend database. Companies would contact us and say they needed the following:

A mobile application for a specific business process, inspection project, or unique business model.
They needed a database to store the data they collected in the field.
They needed mobile middleware to synchronize the data from the mobile devices to the database
Web access to the database so people around the company could easily view the data.
Reports on the data collected in the field.

Sometimes it is easy to focus only on the largest companies that use ERPs, but it is important to recognize that the majority of companies in the world do not use big ERPs and these companies are often service companies doing work in the field. These SMEs do not often have their own mobile middleware. They want as much simplicity as possible.

iPad Databases, Gartner and Enterprise Mobility

I was given a demo of ClickSoftware's field services application using HTML 5 and running on an iPad earlier this week. Very cool! It runs in both offline and online mode and can store the data on the iPad in an offline mode. This is significant because iPad is not set up to store content on the device.

I wonder what HTML 5 will mean to Sybase's mobile database business. Will HTML make developing mobile devices easier? How will HTML change the opportunities for mobile application developers?

I attended a briefing by Gartner's Michael King this week on enterprise mobility. Here are some of his comments:

Security and Enterprise Mobility

A VC (venture capital) firm called me yesterday asking my opinion on the importance of security in enterprise mobile applications. I told him every large enterprise asks about security, but they generally expect the mobile platform to address this issue. For example, if a large enterprise purchased the Sybase Mobility Platform, they would expect that the platform would include a solid security component.

Is that how you see it, or am I wrong?

The VC was looking at potentially funding a number of mobile security start-ups. They wanted to know if there was a market for third party mobile security solutions in large enterprises. I would like your feedback and thoughts on this. Is security simply a check box on a feature list of a mobile platform, or will large enterprises look for additional third party mobile security solutions?

***************************************************
Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, SAP Top Contributor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst
Phone +1 208-991-4410
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join SAP Enterprise Mobility on Linkedin:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=2823585&trk=anet_ug_grppro
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.

Questions about Enterprise Mobility and Recent Industry Developments

I have been contemplating two enterprise mobility subjects today.

1) Syclo is known in the industry for having a very good mobility platform. This has served them well, but may now also be the source of a dilemma. What are they to do with their mobile platform investment in light of SAP's acquisition of Sybase? Syclo, as a co-innovation partner of SAP, will want to support SAP and their Sybase Mobility Platform, but they have a decade worth of investment into their own comprehensive mobility platform.

Here is how Syclo describes their platform, "Syclo's mobile solution framework (Agentry Platform) makes it easy to deploy and manage multiple mobile solutions in all areas of your business. For over a decade, Syclo has built on its mobile expertise and experience at over 750 organizations worldwide to bring you a family of 80 percent preconfigured mobile products that automate work order management, inventory management, scheduling, rounds and readings, turnaround tracking and more. "I image Syclo will now want to offer their customers a choice of two very good platforms, 1) Agentry Mobile Platform, or 2) Sybase Mobility Platform. This will be great for customers, but the challenge for Syclo is developing on and supporting two different platforms and re-engineering their existing mobile applications to run on either. They are self-funded, and this is not a small or inexpensive task.

Kevin's M2M News Weekly - November 3, 2010

Welcome to Kevin's M2M News Weekly, an online newsletter that consists of the most interesting news and articles related to M2M (machine to machine) and embedded mobile devices that I read each week. I aggregate the information, include the original links and add a synopsis of each article. I also search for the latest market numbers such as market size, growth and trends in and around the M2M market.

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Remote sensing is helping a new radiotherapy treatment combat prostate cancer. The therapy works by using three tiny transmitters, the size of a rice grain, implanted in the tumor, which give off a constant stream of signals that are picked up by a receiver in X-ray equipment.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/health-fitness/health/Remote-sensing-to-kill-prostate-cancer/articleshow/6814527.cms

Flexible Mobile Solutions - The Great Debate

When I was managing an enterprise mobility company a few years back, nearly all of my customers wanted the flexibility to customize their own mobile applications and develop new ones from scratch using our MEAP (mobile enterprise application platform) and SDK (software development kit). The reality, though, was different. Our customers seldom wanted to take the time to learn how to develop enterprise quality mobile applications. They just called us and used our professional services to customize or develop new applications.

Here is the dilemma for mobility vendors: Do they develop mobile solutions flexible enough, and with SDKs simple enough, for their customers to build their own solutions, or do they lock down templates and mobile applications with only limited configuration and customization capabilities?

Mobile Applications and Their Real Value

Where is the true value in mobile applications? This is a big question right now for mobility vendors, especially in the SAP ecosystem. SAP acquired Sybase and their SUP (Sybase Unwired Platform), so the platform question is now answered. So where is the real value now for mobility vendors? What are they going to bring to the market that is of great value and provides them with a defensible market position?

Is it the ability to collect data?
Is it the ability to query data from a backend databases?
Is it the ability to synchronize?
Is it the ability to store data on a mobile database in an offline mode?
Is it a mobile apps or forms builder?
Is it the integration with ERPs?
Is it mobile web tools?

Kevin's Mobile Retailing News Weekly - November 2, 2010

What Do Customers Want from a Mobile Retailing Application?

I came across a interesting report today about mobile retail applications. This report came from the EDI/B2B company, Sterling Commerce. You may not expect an EDI/B2B company to be conducting research on mobility, but they provide web portals and other solutions that are now accessed by mobile devices. As a result, it makes sense to conduct research on why customers are accessing portals on mobile devices.

The Sterling Commerce report indicates that product availability is becoming a necessity for impatient shoppers. Nearly two thirds (66 percent) of consumers surveyed considered it important to very important to be able to conveniently determine in-stock availability before visiting a store. It was significantly more popular than store locators and even the ability to read product reviews while in the store.

Microsoft, Enterprise Mobility and Software Development Kits

I read an interesting article on CNET written by Josh Lowensohn on the future of Microsoft's Silverlight. He quotes Microsoft's president of server and tools, Bob Muglia, as saying "our strategy has shifted," and noted that major release cycles for the runtime had slowed. This is an interesting subject for the developers of enterprise mobility applications designed for the Microsoft platforms.

Here is another quote from Microsoft's Muglia, "When we started Silverlight, the number of unique/different Internet-connected devices in the world was relatively small, and our goal was to provide the most consistent, richest experience across those devices, but the world has changed. As a result, getting a single runtime implementation installed on every potential device is practically impossible. We think HTML will provide the broadest, cross-platform reach across all these devices."

Recently I have been seeing and hearing that more and more of the enterprise mobility vendors are looking at HTML 5, and hybrid mixes of native application support and HTML 5 for their roadmaps. I believe we are seeing a significant trend here.

What do you think? Is this a good thing?

Click to Download a Free Aberdeen Report on Mobility in Service

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Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, SAP Top Contributor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst

Phone +1 208-991-4410
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join SAP Enterprise Mobility on Linkedin:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=2823585&trk=anet_ug_grppro
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.