Kevin Benedict Ponders the Future

Mobile Retailing - Macy's and Bloomingdale's Mobile Applications Strategies

Macy's and sister store Bloomingdale's recently announced that they have both recently revised and improved their e-commerce websites to better support their mobile retailing strategy. When customers use an internet-capable mobile device to visit macys.com and bloomingdales.com, they now see larger and clearer images and click-through buttons so using the sites are faster and easier. Technology detects the type of mobile device a shopper is using and customizes the presentation of macys.com and bloomingdales.com to that customer. They have added the following features to their e-commerce websites:

When consumers access their websites through a mobile device, they can view larger and clearer images and click-through buttons.
The site is faster and easier for mobile devices.
New technology detects the type of mobile device and customizes the website accordingly.

Many of their customers come to the website after receiving email messages from Macy's or Bloomingdale's that they read on their mobile devices. When they click the links they routed to the e-commerce website that is now optimized for their mobile device.

On the mobile retailing application side they have done the following:

Macy's upgraded and relaunched their iPhone application - iShop.
They are testing various marketing scenarios and strategies with shopkick and Foursquare.

Macy's new version of the iShop application for iPhones provides the following features.

Loads faster
Navigates easier
Integrates in real-time with macys.com to provide an improved mobile shopping experience
Browse through merchandise
Place and track orders
Read product reviews
Explore gift guides
Find store locations
Access information on special events and campaigns

Macy's is also testing location based services. Here is an excerpt from their recent press release:

Macy's has begun piloting the use of shopkick -- a new location-based shopping app -- at about 150 stores in the New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago markets. By downloading shopkick free from the iPhone App Store, Macy's customers can earn "kickbucks" reward points by simply walking into a Macy's store with their mobile device. They also will receive offers on products or related to specific departments within Macy's. Kickbucks can be redeemed, at the touch of a button on the iPhone, for Facebook Credits to play games online, song downloads, in-store gift rewards at Macy's and other shopkick partner stores, magazine subscriptions, iPods and charitable donations.

I recently interviewed Dan Homrich, CEO of Smartsoft Mobile Solutions about mobile retailing applications. Many of Smartsoft's largest mobility customers are global retailers. Mobile retailing is a fast growing and emerging mobility market segment that compliments SAP's mobile strategy to touch over 1 billion users by 2014. You accomplish that kind of ambitious goal by placing valuable mobile applications into the hands of consumers, not just enterprise users.

***************************************************
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.

My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 6

This is Part 6 in this series on My Advice to Mobile Application Vendors.

Today SIs (Systems Integrators) are wondering about their role in the SAP enterprise mobility ecosystem. They have traditionally played a significant role in SAP implementations, but what about mobility? I had the opportunity to exchange emails recently with Florian Ganz, a systems integrator, with Energy4U a Siemen business in Germany. You many find his experiences and thoughts insightful on this subject.

Florian entered the world of SAP mobility while working at SAP AG. It was 2005, in the middle of SAP's mobility puberty. He was given the challenging task of trying to fix SAP's early mobility projects and their escalating issues. The experience was invaluable, as he quickly became exposed to just about every challenge large enterprises could have with mobile applications. He traveled to almost every continent and spent time with over 35 SAP customers.

In 2008, in the midst of SAP's dark ages in mobility, Florian was introduced to SAP Co-Innovation and mobility partner Syclo. Syclo had a MEAP (mobile enterprise application platform) and pre-developed mobile solutions that were certified on SAP. Many of the challenges that Florian had worked on at SAP were already resolved in the flexible and scalable solutions from Syclo. About this time Florian left SAP AG to help start a new business unit focused on mobility at Energy4U. His experience with SAP, and his new found knowledge of Syclo, enabled them to quickly close new mobility business with companies like RheinEnergie.

Energy4U has now implemented over six large enterprise mobility projects using Syclo's mobility solutions. In addition, they have also implemented many other custom mobile applications. Florian says,"There are many vendors and implementers in the SAP mobile eco-system, but only a few understand both topics (SAP and mobility). The majority lack the SAP, mobility and integration skills that are required." He believes that the key to their success as systems integrators in the mobility space is the fact that most of his team has many years of experience in both enterprise mobility and SAP (I thought it was because his team reads my blog articles!!!).

He is currently very interested in learning the details about the SAP/Sybase roadmap. He has seen many SAP strategies in his time that did not work, so he is more than ready for a plan that will.

I hope to interview Florian in the near future and get some more details regarding his projects.

So Florian's advice, as gleaned from his email: Have in-depth SAP knowledge, years of enterprise mobility experience and deep SAP integration skills. Also, there was value in having experienced all the pain that SAP mobility projects suffered in the early years.

Read the rest of the articles in this series:

***************************************************
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.

27 Questions to Ask a Company Preparing an Enterprise Mobility Strategy

There are enterprise mobile application vendors like Clicksoftware that focus on supporting the needs of SAP customers that have mobile workers in rugged outdoor environments, and there are companies like Smartsoft Mobile Solutions that focus on supporting the needs of large and global retailers that use SAP and want customer facing mobile solutions to sell more products. These environments can be very different from each other. How do you know where to start when developing an enterprise mobility strategy?

If you are an enterprise mobile applications vendor, a member of an IT organization or a systems integrator that is working with a client to help them develop an enterprise mobility strategy, then it would be useful to have a few questions to get the discussions started. The following list of 27 questions is a good start, but I believe it is still an incomplete list. I am sure I have missed important questions, so please click on the "comments" icon below and add to the list.

What business processes are you considering mobilizing?
What ERPs or business applications are involved?
What are your preferred integration strategies?
What business units or departments are involved? Is this a corporate project or departmental?
What are your priorities for mobilizing business processes? Which ones first, second, third?
How many people will be using these mobile applications?
What are the roles and responsibilities of the mobile users?
What are their working environments? Hot, cold, wet, dusty, underground, on a power pole?
Will they always have internet connectivity or do they need offline support as well?
What are the expected ROIs?
What is the desired timeline?
Do you have business process diagrams developed for these solutions? If so, can we review prior to our meeting?
What is your one to three year roadmap for enterprise mobility?
Do you have existing mobile enterprise solutions? If so, please describe.
What are your mobile device or smartphone preferences?
Do you need an SDK (software development kit) to customize and/or edit your own mobile applications?
Do you want to develop your own mobile application in-house, buy off-the-shelf or contract with a third party for a custom mobile application?
If you want to develop in-house, are your stakeholders patient enough to wait for the final product? What are the costs to the business of not delivering on time?
If you develop in-house, who will support new versions of the mobile operating systems and new mobile devices?
Which business unit will budget to pay for upgrades to mobile operating systems and mobile devices? They change every few months? Do you really have developers that will be available for all of these updates and upgrades?
How will you support it? What is the plan for supporting mobile applications and mobile devices?
What countries will be using it?
What data plans does the company want to use in each country?
How will you manage the data plans?
What is the policy for replacing missing or damaged mobile devices?
Which business unit will pay for lost devices and data plans?
What is the process for approving mobile access to ERPs and business processes?

There are many more questions that will be asked and answered once there is a formal strategy and project, but this high level list is intended to get an IT organization thinking about some of the bigger issues and priorities before drilling down into specific mobile application project requirements.

Let me know if you would like me to help your organization think through these issues. I have a bit of experience in this area.

***************************************************
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 Mobility News Weekly - September 16, 2010

Kevin's Mobility News Weekly is an online newsletter that is 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.

Archived editions of Kevin's Mobility News Weekly are available at http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/p/kevins-mobility-news-weekly.html

You can follow me on Twitter @krbenedict and read my blog, Enterprise Mobility Strategies for SAP and Others.

Also available are Kevin’s M2M News Weekly and Kevin’s Mobile Retailing News Weekly.

********

I have added a feature to my blog site that supports email subscriptions. You can now receive all blog articles directly via email. If you are interested, click here.

********

Market research firm IDC has increased its growth projections for this year's smartphone sales by 10 percent. The firm now expects smartphone sales to increase 55.4 percent compared to last year, to hit 269.6 million units.

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/daily_news/article.php/410846/IDC-Global-Smartphone-Market-to-Grow-554-Percent-This-Year.htm

********

ClickSoftware is an SAP mobility partner and the leading provider of automated workforce management and optimization solutions for every size of service business. This newsletter is sponsored in part by ClickSoftware - http://www.clicksoftware.com/.

********

Startup Leapfactor Inc. is making a big enterprise push with a new cloud-based mobile application platform that it says can mobilize any business app or process for thousands of employees. In its bid to consumerize the enterprise, the SAP AG partner is looking to help the wireless operators take on corporate America.

http://making-money-investing.com/telecom-startup-sees-enterprise-apps-as-telco-opportunity.html

********

According to Gartner, Android will capture 17.7 percent of the smartphone market this year, slightly more than BlackBerry's 17.5 percent share. Symbian will remain on top with 40.1 percent this year, while Apple's iOS will come in fourth with 15.4 percent of the market in 2010.

http://www.businessinsider.com/android-will-blow-past-apple-and-rim-to-become-second-biggest-mobile-os-this-year-2010-9

********

SAP CIO Oliver Bussmann tweeted recently that the enterprise software vendor has already rolled out iPads to 1,000 employees.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/sybase/sap-has-deployed-1000-ipads-to-its-employees/411?tag=zd-left

********

Apple announced recently that it has lifted restrictions on its third party developer guidelines that impacts Adobe’s Packager for iPhone, a feature in the Flash Professional CS5 authoring tool.

http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/09/great-news-for-developers.html

********

“As mobility continues to play a key role in enabling companies to achieve greater productivity worldwide, IDC expects the global mobile worker population to increase from 919.4 million in 2008 to more than 1.19 billion in 2013, representing nearly 35 percent of the worldwide workforce," said Sean Ryan, research analyst for IDC's Mobile Enterprise group.

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=221309

********

The Motorola Solutions business of Motorola, Inc. and Ericsson hope to advance Public Safety communications. Specifically, an LTE based solution for public safety mobile broadband that will interoperate with mission critical voice and data to unify the delivery of high performing voice and broadband multimedia applications.

http://www.telecomengine.com/article.asp?HH_ID=AR_6562

********

I registered for SAP's TechEd 2010 Las Vegas! I am excited about it this year - the year of mobility! SAP's 2010 focus is - on premise, on demand and on device - MOBILE device that is. I will be teaching a session on The Future of Enterprise Mobility. I have seen the conference agenda and it is packed full of sessions on mobility. I hope to see all of you there!

http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/2010/08/kevin-benedict-on-teched-2010-in-las.html

********

Google unveiled Instant, a new predictive search tool that dynamically displays results as the user types, promising the solution will expand from the desktop to mobile devices this fall.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/08/google-instant-mobile/

********

RIM recently stated that more than 30 million BlackBerry smartphone users across 65 countries have downloaded BlackBerry App World since the store first opened, with consumers averaging more than a million app downloads each day. The BlackBerry platform now represents 18.2 percent of the worldwide smartphone market according to data issued earlier this month by research firm Gartner, behind Symbian at 41.2 percent.

http://www.fiercemobilecontent.com/story/blackberry-app-world-edges-past-10-000-applications/2010-09-09?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal

********

Google Inc's Android software will become the world's second most popular operating system for cell phones this year, leapfrogging rival offerings from Microsoft Corp, Research in Motion and Apple Inc, according to a new report.

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE68745L20100910

********

Dell Inc. wants to put its new tablet into the lab coats of doctors, as it aims to broaden the appeal of the device beyond consumers and tie it more closely to the company's software.

http://mobile.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE68E0PJ20100915

********

Before nearly 100 reporters and analysts at its San Francisco office today, Twitter unfurled a redesign, which includes multimedia links that can be viewed from within a Twitter account, rather than from a separate browser page.

http://iphone.usatoday.com/Tech/2031973/

********

Google has introduced a beta Walking Navigation service for users of Android phones as part of Google Maps for mobile 4.5.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/infrastructure/WAN_optimization/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227400096&cid=nl_IW_daily_2010-09-13_h

********

YouTube is conducting a limited test of a live video streaming platform. I wonder what this means for smartphone video cameras?

http://www.informationweek.com/news/infrastructure/traffic_management/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227400233&cid=nl_IW_daily_2010-09-14_h

********

About 6.4 billion application downloads were made globally in 2009 alone from native and third party application stores, generating revenues of $4.5 billion in the same year.

http://www.live-pr.com/en/mobile-app-downloads-generated-4-5-billion-r1048562564.htm

********

Recent articles from Kevin Benedict’s blog Enterprise Mobility Strategies for SAP and Others

• Compliance Functions for Mobile Applications
• 10 Costly Mistakes to Avoid When Selecting and Implementing a Mobility Solution
• My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 1
• My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 2
• My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 3
• My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 4
• My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 5
• SAP Mentor Monday - Pre-Recorded SAP Enterprise Mobility Webinar

Recommended Whitepaper

Networked Field Services - http://www.clicksoftware.com/1c7060c0-1296-4c54-90d6-8f83c5c5ecf0/knowledge-center-white-papers-registration.htm

***************************************************
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.

***************************************************

My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 5

This is part 5 of this article series.

As an enterprise mobility vendor you need to recognize where your intellectual property is and where it will be developed in the future. This can significantly impact your potential value. Let me provide a scenario for your consideration.

An enterprise mobility vendor develops a MEAP (mobile enterprise application platform) that includes an SDK (software development kit). They want every software developer in the world to use their platform and SDK. They believe this will drive revenue from many different channels and allow them to enter new markets through these developers which will keep their cost of sales and marketing low. They can see the money train coming down the tracks.

The first part of their strategy works. They get their generic MEAP and SDK into the hands of many developers. The developers use the SDK to develop very interesting and complex mobile applications for many different markets. The mobile applications are branded by the developer. The developers start creating a customer base and developing their brand.

However, once the developers' businesses grow large enough, they decide they can replace your MEAP and any licensing commitments with their own technology so they can keep more of the revenue. You lose the market, the revenue, and the sales channel. Their customers don't know the difference since the finished mobile application looks the same.

The MEAP vendor is in trouble. Their business plan predicted they would grow at the same rate as their customers. They failed to anticipate they would only be an interim solution.

The MEAP vendor also thought they would own the code generated by their SDK and MEAP, and it would increase the value of their company. However, the software developers quickly begin to resist this notion as they also wanted to build their own IP library and company's value.

Who owns the IP (intellectual property) for the mobile applications developed on the MEAP and the SDK? If your contract says the MEAP/SDK author owns all code developed on it, you will get few developers to use it. The MEAP author wants the MEAP to lock in or tie developers to them. However, developers only brand and promote the finished mobile application. They don't want to promote your SDK or MEAP, only their branded apps.

The MEAP vendor wants to increase their IP and the value of their company. However, the more IP the MEAP vendor provides, the less opportunity there is for developers to build their own IP library and company value by utilizing it.

While the MEAP and SDK vendor's business plan calls for them to become increasingly valuable to their users, they are in fact increasingly competing with their customer base. How do you see reconciling this challenge?

I look forward to your thoughts and comments.

If you would like to discuss this subject or my consulting services in more detail please contact me.

Stay tuned for part 6 in this article series.

My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 1
My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 2
My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 3
My Advice to Mobile Applications Vendors, Part 4

***************************************************
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.

http://www.clicksoftware.com/e86e075b-4fca-44c9-bfeb-4efcc978f416/knowledge-center-white-papers-delivery.htm