Mobile Expert Video Series: Sybase's Willie Jow

I was able to catch up with Sybase's VP of Mobile Solutions, Willie Jow for an interview last week in Las Vegas at that Enterprise Mobility Exchange 2011.  In this interview he shares his thoughts on enterprise mobility and strategies.  He focuses on mobile business intelligence, the full circle mobility concept and the real-time enterprise.

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Kevin Benedict, Independent Mobile Industry Analyst, Consultant and SAP Mentor Volunteer

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Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility analyst, consultant and blogger. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

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 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.