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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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.

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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/
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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.

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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/
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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.

1. Those that provide real-time mobile views of complete SAP applications
2. Those that provide mobile queries and reports on SAP data
3. Those that provide custom mobile forms for subsets of SAP business processes based upon roles and responsibilities
4. 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
5. 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.

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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/
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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:

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

I invite your thoughts and comments.

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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/
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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?

1. Who needs access to SAP system data, but is not sitting in a cubicle with SAP access today?
2. 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.
3. 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?
4. What supervisors need access to SAP anywhere and at anytime?
5. What managers need SAP management reports while on the road?
6. 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?
7. Should the logistics department have mobile "proof-of-delivery" applications in the hands of their truck drivers?
8. Should plant maintenance managers have mobile inspection applications that feed SAP?
9. Should service technicians be using mobile service tickets that feed SAP or an SAP partner's work order management system?
10. 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.

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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/
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Advice for Mobile Start-Ups: Find Your Market Aggregation Points

Mobile start-ups often struggle with how to get their message, product and company brand in front of their target markets. They quickly realize that the expense of marketing their solutions directly to each end user is cost prohibitive. How then can they effectively market their solutions in a cost effective manner?

Mobile start-ups need to first identify their target market, and second identify the "market aggregation" points. In the image above, look at the red dots. Those are the market aggregation points. Those are the points where the mobile start-up needs to be marketing. Why? That is where their audience can be found. The eyes and ears of their target market are tuned to that location.

Mobile start-ups should focus all of their efforts and financial resources on the red dot - market aggregation points. Often it costs no more to invest resources in the red dots, than it does to target each end user - end point.

If you are targeting SAP Mobility, then you will want to look for locations that aggregate that market. Where can you find the eyes and ears of the SAP market? If you are focused on field service automation, where is that market aggregated? If your solutions are exclusively for SAP ERP for iPhones, then where is your market aggregated?

Where are the red dot market aggregation points for your market?

If you would like to discuss this topic in more detail please contact me.

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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/
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$21 Million Raised by Pressing the Keys on a Mobile Device

The Red Cross was "texted" $21 million dollars in donations for Haiti disaster relief efforts according to this article. This is an incredible development, and it happened on mobile devices.

The Haiti relief campaign has been promoted by both traditional media sources and online social media. However, it really took off in the first couple of days through its promotion on Facebook and Twitter. The report said these donations were texted, so these donations were submitted on mobile devices.

It works like this:

1. You get notified of the campaign through a mobile Facebook or twitter application
2. You send a text to a given number and a $10 dollar charge (donation) appears on your mobile phone bill.
3. You pay your mobile phone bill and the money is transferred from your carrier to the Red Cross

I am amazed at this example of the power represented by mobile communications, social media and mobile devices. I am also intrigued by the e-commerce processes represented by using the mobile phone billing system to collect these donations.

By simply pushing a few buttons on a handheld mobile device you can (collectively) be saving lives on the other side of the planet.

Let's all take a moment to be amazed together, and celebrate the good in these times of pain.

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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/
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