Kevin Benedict Ponders the Future

Mobile Expert Interview Series: Energy4U's Florian Ganz, Part 2

This is Part 2 of this intervew with Energy4U's Florian Ganz. You can read Part 1 here.

Kevin: Can you tell us about some of your recent SAP enterprise mobility projects?

Florian: Certainly.

Power Plant Maintenance Project:

We are working with one of the big utility companies in Germany. The project involves the power plant maintenance processes. The company is an existing SAP user and we are replacing their 1st generation mobility solution that has poor performance and was not able to carry all required offline data.

The customer uses the SAP Plant Maintenance module. Energy4U is implementing Syclo's mobile solution and integrating it with SAP Plant Maintenance. The customer will use both laptops and rugged handheld computers (Psion Teklogix rugged devices including RFID). They will start with 20 mobile users and expand to 100.

The key to winning this project was the ability to deliver a proof of concept within only two weeks.

Utility Project in Italy:

This project was sold by SAP's sales force and involved the solution SAP Workforce Scheduling and Optimization from ClickSoftware.

This SAP user wanted to centralize the dispatch of hundreds of service technicians to increase efficiencies by optimizing routes and reducing travel times and expenses. The SAP sales team brought in ClickSoftware's solution and Energy4U, a Siemens business, to do the implementation.

The project started in May and integration testing will start end of this month (October). The mobility component will quickly follow. The service technicians will use a combination of laptops mounted in their vehicles and PDAs.

Large Pharmaceutical Company:

This SAP customer had a first generation mobile solution that suffered from poor synchronization performance and overall SAP integration problems. They came to Energy4U for a mobile solution that would work with SAP Plant Maintenance and could handle over 100,000 equipments and functional locations (SAP objects) in the asset management database on the PDA in an offline and online mode.

The customer is using SAP Plant Maintenance and SAP Materials Management. They wanted a service technician dispatch system (they chose a solution developed by Energy4U) that worked with SAP. They needed a solution that could work both offline and online. The customer selected Motorola's ES400 ruggedized smartphone to use in the field.

Besides these three projects, we are working with various other customers to ensure that their mobility efforts are successful.

You need more information? Feel free to get in contact with Florian: SERVICES@energy4u.org.

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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.

Mobile Expert Interview Series: Energy4U's Florian Ganz, Part 1

Florian and I have been attempting to schedule an interview for sometime now, but he is always on a train to Switzerland, Italy or going out to dinner with big shots in Munich. What a life! I am happy I was able to catch up and get his insights into the SAP enterprise mobility market.

Florian worked at SAP AG in Germany from 2002 through 2008 and was involved in many early mobility projects with SAP. It was during this time that he got to know my good friend from PricewaterhouseCoopers, Dr. Ahmed El Adl.

Kevin’s Mobile Retailing News Weekly – October 12, 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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A reported 81 percent of young consumers around the world are "interested" or "very interested" in employing wireless handsets as a "wallet" linked to bank accounts and loyalty cards.

http://www.warc.com/News/TopNews.asp?ID=27323

Mobile Expert Interview Series: Sybase's Sam Lakkundi, Part 3

This is Part 3 of this interview with Sybase's Sam Lakkundi.

Kevin: How can SAP partners and SAP customers develop mobile solutions today when SAP and Sybase's road map is still a moving target?

Sam: If I were to look into the crystal ball, what direction would I give? Use SUP as the target. It is the integration and middleware layer. Ask yourself, “How do I use and take advantage and add value to what SAP/Sybase are developing?” (See public statements from SAP/Sybase on their mobility road map).

Mobile Expert Interview Series: Sybase's Sam Lakkundi, Part 2

This is Part 2 of this interview with Sybase's Sam Lakkundi.

Kevin: Historically, Sybase has not been known as a mobile application company. They didn’t want to compete with their OEM customer base. Bob Stutz is now tasked with developing mobile SAP applications in the new Mobile Application Business Unit. Why are they doing this?

I had the pleasure to interview Sybase's Sam Lakkundi last week. Sam is an enterprise mobility architect and a “SWAT” team member at Sybase, an SAP company. He has 15 years experience at Sybase working directly with customers that employ a wide range of technologies including database, application server, and mobile engineering. For the past seven years, he has focused on architecting and implementing mobile solutions for customers around the globe.

I am beginning to see more and more mobile applications that use photos and maps as GUIs (graphical user interfaces). In the world of mobile augmented reality, the photo can be the main menu of the mobile application.

The image on the right is from an application called TouchInspect by Mobile Epiphany. The founder of Mobile Epiphany, Glenn Kletzky, has many years of in depth experience in the electronic games industry and takes a unique and graphically rich approach to many of the GUIs in his mobile data collection applications.

This is a very interesting approach to GUIs. It is not just a text based menu system, but images that can quickly paint a thousand words. Glenn describes his GUI design as a finger-touch-based interface that is trainable within an hour.

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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.

SAP's Puneet Suppal and Kevin Benedict at TechEd Las Vegas

My good friend Puneet Suppal with SAP's Premier Customer Network wrote an interesting article over the weekend on SAP enterprise mobility. Here is an excerpt, "In June 2010, Information Week listed the top 10 reasons that will likely get CIOs fired this year. "Failure to embrace mobility" was the number 2 reason! In a recent survey done by Forrester it was found that about 48% of the organizations interviewed were going to invest in mobilizing applications in 2010, with another 37% keenly interested as well.

SAP Mobility Roadmap in Their Own Words

Many of you have asked me for details on SAP's enterprise mobility roadmap. I will be publishing an interview with Sybase's Sam Lakkundi later this week on that subject, but first wanted to highlight what SAP has publicly stated already.

SAP's public statements:

Within the next nine months (Sapphire 2011), the companies will bring together technologies to deliver a leading mobile platform for business that is based on open standards, runs on all major mobile operating systems, and manages and supports all major device types. With this platform, customers and partners can build new mobile experiences on top of existing applications, such as SAP® Business Suite software. In addition, SAP will showcase mobile experiences for all products, including both SAP Business Suite and SAP® Business ByDesign™, similar to what is available for mobile sales for customer relationship management (CRM) today.

SAP and Sybase Form New Mobile Business Unit in Response to Kevin's Blog Article

Last week I wrote an article, Do SAP and Sybase Recognize What is Happening? to encourage SAP and Sybase to add resources to support the increasing demand for enterprise mobility within the SAP ecosystem. I think Jim Hagemann Snabe and Bill McDermott (SAP's co-CEOs) must have read my blog. At least that is what I tell myself. This week SAP and Sybase announced a reorganization around mobility. The stated purpose is to further support customers and facilitate the rapid adoption of enterprise mobility.

Kevin's Mobility News Weekly - October 7, 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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According to Microsoft's annual proxy statement, CEO Steve Ballmer received $670,000 in bonus for the last financial year, half what he could have earned in rewards.

Kevin's M2M News Weekly - October 6, 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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This “Internet of Things” or M2M network adds another dimension to the existing notions of networks. It envisages an anytime, anywhere, anyone, anything network bringing about a complete ubiquity to computing.

iPhone, iPad, Netbook, Blackberry

OK, I don't want to report this trend. I am all about convergence and combining more and better features into small pocket size devices called smartphones, but my journalistic side beckons. I have conducted quite a few interviews with leading minds in the enterprise mobility space (read the series here). In these interviews one of my favorite questions is, "What mobile device do you carry?"

Here are some recent answers to my interview question:

Mobile Expert Interview Series: Syclo's CEO Rich Padula

October is traditionally a very busy time for high tech companies, and this year there is no busier category than enterprise mobility. For that reason, I was especially pleased that Syclo's CEO Rich Padula made himself available for a brief interview last week.

Kevin: Rich, what mobile device(s) do you carry?
Rich: I carry a Blackberry, iPad, Netbook and iPod. I have a desktop in the office.

SAP CIO Oliver Bussman

I am excited to report that I will be conducting the SAP TechEd Live interview (see sample) with SAP CIO Oliver Bussman later this month at TechEd in Las Vegas. Oliver Bussman is involved in all the major mobility projects that are rolled out within the SAP organization.

Oliver spoke about some of his recent mobility projects in this article:

SAP has rolled out almost 1,500 iPads for users across its business
The iPads were configured with email access, access to a virtual private network (VPN), Citrix software to enable access to server-based applications and business intelligence tools via BusinessObjects.
The company currently has 17,000 BlackBerrys rolled out across the organisation and Bussmann said that within 12 months, there will be as many iPads in use by SAP employees.

If you have questions that you want me to ask Oliver, please comment below and I will add them to the list.

I hope to see you in Vegas!

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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.

What are Machines Talking About?

M2M and Kevin Benedict

In the article M2M: Driving Expoential Growth in Connections, author Perry LaFarge writes, "The number of machines communicating with each other wirelessly will soon dwarf the number of people connected via mobile devices."

What kind of machines are communicating with each other? Machines like Redbox movie kiosks communicating DVD inventories to iPhone users; tractors and other heavy equipment reporting their maintenance status to the central office; and all kinds of high value assets reporting their location, status and numerous other details monitored by remote sensors. Homes are also reporting minute by minute energy consumption to both the homeowner and the utility through smart meters and smart grids. The use cases are endless.

Kevin's Mobile Retailing News Weekly - October 5, 2010

iPhone Owners First in Online Shopping and BlackBerry Owners are Last

In an article I read today on mobile marketing it said, "Consumers who own an Apple iPhone are more likely to shop online from their phones, than those consumers who owned phones based on Google Android or BlackBerry operating systems...BlackBerry is way behind the Android and iPhone."

Santa Claus Smartphones and Online Shopping

I read this in the Dallas Morning News online version today, "Last year, more than 60 million Americans were mobile Web users, up 33 percent from 2008, according to Nielsen. This holiday season, Nielsen predicts one-third of all mobile phones in use will be smartphones, up from 21 percent a year ago.

Mobile Expert Interview Series: WorkLight's COO Kurt Daniel

I interviewed WorkLight's COO, Kurt Daniel this week. This was an interesting interview, as WorkLight is following a different strategy than most enterprise mobility vendors. They have developed a MEAP (mobile enterprise application platform) and a mobile SDK (software development kit), not for their own use, but rather for systems integrators and end customers to use to develop their own enterprise mobility solutions. They want to be a technology company, not a mobile application company.

Virtual Utility Summit - Optimize Your Mobile Workforce

I came across this virtual utility summit that is offered this week. If you are involved in enterprise mobility projects for a utility company, this may be for you. Here is the description:

Discuss the challenges and opportunities around effectively managing the mobile workforce in your utility. With today's environmental, regulatory and economic pressures the issue of effectively managing a mobile workforce has never been more critical. Yet very few, if any, events focus on this important subject matter.
The virtual summit will explore key aspects of workforce management; from managing a smart metering rollout and handling multi-stage and multi-day work and crew management.
Hear from industry experts and utility organizations that have implemented workforce management systems to transform their business.

Kevin's Mobility News Weekly - September 30, 2010

SMS, Human Capital Management and Mobile Applications

It is easy to think that high value mobile applications need to be complex and sophisticated, but that is not always the case. This morning I read about a solution that helps firefighters manage their human resources and schedules by interacting with their staff via SMS. The solution, called ClickRoster, will automatically create the roster for every fire station and every shift for both full time and part time firefighters, allocating individuals to specific roles based on skill requirements and the Watch Managers’ decisions.

Ventureforth Delivers Mobile Enterprise Solutions for Oracle PeopleSoft Using Syclo's Agentry Platform

Ventureforth, a Syclo Independent Software Vendor, licenses and develops off-the-shelf mobile solutions for Oracle, PeopleSoft and Indus (Ventyx) with the configurable mobile platform architecture from Syclo’s Agentry platform. This is interesting for two reasons:

Last week I interviewed the COO of Worklight, Kurt Daniels (see interview later this week) and learned about their strategy to become the leading mobile application platform for smartphones, tablets and beyond. What makes them unique? They want to be experts in mobile technologies, Mobile SDKs (software development kits) and platforms, but they don't want to develop mobile applications themselves. They want to support systems integrators and customers that want to develop their own mobile solutions.