Mobile Expert Interview Series: Acando's Hans Nygaard, Part 1

 Acando's Hans Nygaard

I recently had the privelege of interviewing Hans Nygaard from Acando, a consultancy company with over 1,000 employees in six European countries.  SAP is one of Acando's most important partners.

Hans is the Manager for Mobile Solutions and focuses most of his time on blue collar and field services kinds of mobile projects.  They work on a lot of 100-200 user projects, but are currently working on a large deployment that includes 5,000 service technicians in 14 countries.

Hans has been working in the SAP ecosystem since 2003 and on SAP related mobility projects since 2007.  He has a wife and two kids and lives 45 minutes outside of Copenhagen.

Note:  This interview consists of both written and verbal responses from Hans.

Kevin:  Since you have been involved in SAP enterprise mobility since 2007, what are your thoughts about SAP's acquisition of Sybase in 2010?
Hans: I have mixed feelings.  It was a lot of money.  Sybase has great offline and push mobile technology, so that is good, but I am still confused about how Sybase's and SAP's middleware will merge into one mobile middleware solution.

Kevin: What mobile device(s) do you carry?
Hans: iPhone 4, iPad and a laptop (PC).

MacBook Pro, Safari, Pages and Blogging Headaches

Any Advice?

You may have noticed that I have been struggling with some font and formatting issues this week in my articles.  After a lifetime on PCs, I have purchased a MacBook Pro.  Along with the MacBook Pro, I am trying to use Pages (and Word for Macs) and Safari to access and post to my blogging platform.  I am having many annoying formatting issues.  The Apple environment is introducing all kinds of junk code which is messing up my text formatting.

Any advice? 

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Kevin Benedict, Independent Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst, SAP Mentor Volunteer
Phone +1 208-991-4410
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the SAP Enterprise Mobility group 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 Mobility News Weekly – Week of February 7, 2011

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 data and trends.

Also read Kevin’s Field Mobility News Weekly

Also read Kevin’s Mobile Retailing News Weekly

Also read Kevin’s Mobile Money News Weekly

Also read Kevin’s M2M News Monthly

Mobile development vendor appMobi has just closed an impressive $6 million round of all angel series B financing to further provide platform as a service tools for developers and others in the mobile ecosystem.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/24/appmobi-closes-6m-to-improve-mobile-app-technology/

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Tactical Nav is an app that lets a soldier map and plot waypoints on a battlefield, take photos and share coordinates with fellow soldiers and units, direct artillery and call in medevac.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/iphone_app_lets_soldiers_map_their_battlefields.php

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Despite three years of global financial bleakness, 2010 brought huge growth to mobile/wireless.  Global handset shipments rose to more than 1.3 billion units, over 20 percent of them smartphones.

Mobile Expert Interview Series: Newelo's Kimmo Jarvensivu

Newelo's Kimmo Jarvensivu

One of the things that has been missing from my Mobile Expert Interview Series is the European view on enterprise mobility, so this week you will see a number of interviews from mobile experts from that side of the pond.

Today, we are interviewing Kimmo Jarvensivu who is the VP of Sales and Business Development for mobile platform vendor Newelo which is located in Finland. Newelo is a spin-off from Nokia currently with ten direct employees and part of the R&D is subcontracted. He is also a big fan of anything Finnish including Angry Birds!

First, some background on Kimmo.  He worked as a GIS consultant in the 90s, and in 1996 moved to Nokia Networks for Operation Support Systems.  Later, he moved into Nokia's Managed Services area which was responsible for GSM network operations and Field Force Management around the world. 

Note:  I interviewed Kimmo using Skype.  He also sent me written responses to many of my questions.  I combined my notes with his answers for this article.

Kevin: What mobile device(s) do you carry?

Kimmo: Currently I have with me Nokia N900, N8 and E72. N900 is my personal phone, others are for testing purposes. On my desk, I have iPhone and Android ZTE Blade and Archos 7o Internet tablet. It is good to compare different mobile devices and gain end-user experience. In our business area, the most important factors are end-user experience and integration to backoffice system, so it is good to have "hands-on" experience on those applications and devices.

Mobile Expert Interview Series: SAP's Jack Chawla

SAP's Jack Chawla

I had the privilege to interview Jack Chawla, who is Senior Director, Technology Marketing with SAP's Mobile Business Unit last week via email.

Note:  This interview took place via email, so these are Jack Chawla's words with minor edits.

Kevin:  What mobile device(s) do you carry?
Jack:  I generally have the following devices in my vicinity. . . BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone, MBA and Lenovo.  While traveling, I try to carry not more than three devices. . . but sometimes I end up carrying more devices than pants!

Kevin:  What are your favorite mobile applications that you have on your mobile devices?
Jack:  I use Twitter, Bloomberg, Yelp, NYT, Pandora, Kindle, Google Maps, Google Search, Gmail and Camera apps the most.  I have more apps than I would like to admit on my devices.

Kevin:  Do you use your mobile device to buy things?
Jack:  Yes, I use the Amazon app to find and buy stuff cheaper than in retail stores!  I love the Amazon Remembers feature.

Kevin’s Mobile Money News Weekly – Week of February 7, 2011

Kevin’s Mobile Money News Weekly is an online newsletter made up of the most interesting news, articles and links related to mobile payments, mobile money, e-wallets, mobile banking and mobile security that I run across each week.  I am specifically targeting market size and market trend information.

Also read Kevin’s Field Mobility News Weekly

Also read Kevin’s M2M News Monthly

Also read Kevin’s Mobile Retailing News Weekly

Also read Kevin’s Mobility News Weekly

I will be participating in a two part webinar next week on Thursday, February 17, 2011 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm EST that I invite all of you to attend.  I will be presenting my research results in the first part called Challenges in Enterprise Mobility from the Experts, and the second part, The Latest Thinking and Strategies for Deploying Flexible Mobile Solutions - The Four Big Issues for Mobilizing SAP and Other Enterprise Systems will be presented by Steve Levy, mobile industry expert and CEO of Pyxis Mobile.   Please join us!  Register here.

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Mobile payment systems are expected to revolutionize the card payment industry in the coming years, and could be worth as much as $44 billion by 2015.

http://www.creditnet.com/credit-news/new-mobile-payment-option-available-for-small-purchases-800387612.php

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Consumers will significantly shift their shopping habits away from e-commerce to focus attention on the budding mobile landscape within the next 12 months, predicts research aggregator eMarketer.

http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/mobile-shopping-ecommerce-emarketer-0951/

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Research shows that 40 percent of consumers reach for their mobile phones when they see an advertisement, with 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm being the hottest times for at home mobile shopping.

Mobile Expert Interview Series: AMT-Sybex's Malachy Martin



Malachy Martin

 I was able to schedule a call with AMT-Sybex's mobile strategy manager Malachy Martin this morning for an interview.  Malachy is from Northern Ireland (his mobile application development team is located in Belfast), but he now lives and works in the UK.  He has been in the enterprise mobility space for a decade now.  He started his mobility career working on mobile solutions for utility companies.  He is now head of mobile strategy, and as such he works with customers and key partners like ClickSoftware, SAP/Sybase and Syclo.



Before jumping into the interview I wanted to address a question that was posed to me last week by an individual at SAP.  I was asked why many of my interviews included the same questions.  I explained that if I ask the same question of dozens of enterprise mobility experts, then their aggregated answers will provide us with a comprehensive view and understanding of many key issues in enterprise mobility.

Note:  These are not  Malachy's exact words, rather my notes from our interview.

Kevin: What mobile device(s) do you carry?

Malachy: A BlackBerry for work, Samsung smartphone for personal use and Windows Mobile 6.5 for testing industrial grade handheld computers, a tablet and a Dell laptop.

Kevin: Do you use mobile devices to purchase products and services?

Malachy: Yes, I use my laptop to purchase many things, but not my smartphones.

Food and Enterprise Mobility

I have been learning a lot lately while running.  OK, mostly walking, but briskly.  I listen to the ScienceNow podcast on my iPhone.  The average U.S. grocery store throws out 2,000 lbs of produce per week(the total for all grocery stores is estimated at 30 million pounds of food each day), and 50 percent of all produce grown in the US is not consumed before it becomes waste.

Those numbers seem like problems that mobile solutions can help alleviate. In Jonathan Bloom's new book American Wasteland he reports that the US produces about 591 billion pounds of food each year of which about 50 percent goes to waste somewhere along the food supply chain. This includes unused restaurant food, food in the field and vegetables and fruits in the grocery store as examples.  Bloom identifies the following areas where much of the waste occurs:

• The field
• Lost in transit
• Supermarket throw away
• Commerical kitchens such as hospitals, schools and restaurants
• Households

Independent Mobility Analyst - What Does that Mean?

Talk, Talk, Talk

I had a person ask me today about the meaning of independent mobility analyst.  That is a fair question so let me try to explain what I do.  The first thing to know is that I wear many hats.  I am a blogger (just topped 1,000 articles), journalist, consultant, experienced executive, advisor, workshop facilitator and analyst.  I conduct research and write reports on issues related to enterprise mobility and M2M (machine-to-machine communications). Often I write these analyst reports on contract to analyst firms. 



In addition to writing analyst reports, I also write articles nearly every day that are published at http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/ and on many other sites related to enterprise mobility.  I also publish five newsletters on various niche markets within enterprise mobility each week.  I am regularly invited to speak on webinars and at technology conferences, user groups and other events.  I have led sessions at Sapphire, SAP TechEd, ASUG chapter meetings and SAP Insider events.  Next month I will be leading two sessions at the Mastering SAP Technologies conference in Sydney, Australia.

In between researching, writing, participating in webinars and speaking at conferences, I spend time consulting, recording podcasts and videos, and volunteering my time as an SAP Mentor.  My background is general enterprise mobility and B2B e-commerce, but I spend the majority of my time working within the SAP ecosystem.

That is my odd work life as an independent freelancer.

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Kevin Benedict, Independent Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst, SAP Mentor
Phone +1 208-991-4410
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the SAP Enterprise Mobility group 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.

The Latest Thinking and Strategies for Deploying Flexible Mobile Solutions

Mobility can be a Challenge

I will be participating in a two part webinar next week on Thursday, February 17, 2011 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM EST that I invite all of you to attend.  I will be presenting my research results in the first part called Challenges in Enterprise Mobility from the Experts, and the second part, The Latest Thinking and Strategies for Deploying Flexible Mobile Solutions - The Four Big Issues for Mobilizing SAP and Other Enterprise Systems will be presented by Steve Levy, mobile industry expert and CEO of Pyxis Mobile.

Enterprise-grade mobility is quickly becoming a core component of every company’s IT environment. However, it brings with it some big and often hidden challenges that companies need to plan for, including:

1. Multi-device proliferation: support for a growing number of smartphones
2. Data integration: the freedom to connect to any data in the enterprise
3. Security: more than just authentication
4. Agility: the need to iteratively update applications with new content and functionality in a quick and easy way

 Please join us!  Register here.

***************************************************
Kevin Benedict, SAP Mentor, Mobile and M2M Industry Analyst
Phone +1 208-991-4410
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Join the SAP Enterprise Mobility group 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.