The enterprise mobile software market is heating up. SAP
recently announced its intent to acquire
middleware giant Sybase for $5.8 billion. On the heels of that, Sybase
unveiled its new Mobility Platform. Together, the two companies are destined to
be a force in the enterprise mobile software market—a space long overdue for
definition and leadership. Many VARs and IT solution providers rely on Sybase
for its mobile middleware, databases and development kits. So, will the SAP
acquisition and the new platform help or hurt solution providers?
The skinny on the Sybase Mobility Platform and its applications
Briefly, the platform is mostly a repackaging of Sybase's existing mobile
assets with some new flavors and twists that will enable resellers, solution
providers and enterprises to go to Sybase as a one-stop shop for all their
mobile services and software needs, if they choose.
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SAP, Sybase and Partners—Cannibalize or Thrive?
The new Sybase Mobility Platform has three components and is a combination of
cloud-based services and on-site software: server-based software, mobile
services and packaged applications. The platform supports almost every platform
and device, including plain-old feature phones, RIM BlackBerry, Microsoft
Windows, iPhone, Symbian and more. No Android, yet, but Sybase Senior Vice President
Gary Kovacs says the company plans to support it in the first quarter of 2011.
The new Mobile Server Package includes Sybase mobile software assets taken from
various acquisitions and homegrown solutions like iAnywhere, Afaria and the
Unwired Platform. Products span the gamut of a mobile SDK (software development
kit), device management, application middleware, mobile e-mail and more.
Sybase's Mobile Services component offers a variety of mCommerce, billing,
mobile marketing and secure messaging services designed to help enterprises
manage and execute business-to-consumer and business-to-employee mobile
applications in a wide variety of industries.
Delivering packaged applications is completely new for Sybase, and it is no
surprise that with acquisition news, the first ones available include two
applications focused on Mobile Sales for SAP CRM and Mobile Work Flow for SAP
Business Suite. There is also one for mBanking.
Sybase plans to unveil more SAP applications, but Kovacs says the company knows
it will have to rely on vertical solutions players, VARs and others to meet the
enterprise demand for all the required mobile applications.
SAP aims to lead the mobile
space—Will it?
SAP has been fiddling around with mobile
since the '90s. Over the past decade, the Swiss giant made a few mobile-focused
acquisitions as well as investing in mobile research and development trying to
solve the mobility problem. In 2009, the company announced a strategy that
named RIM, Sybase and Syclo as its key mobile co-innovation partners. Until
then, SAP chose to go it alone and never
really achieved huge amounts of enterprise mobility success. Its products went
through numerous iterations and naming as it attempted to sell into its install
base.
Why? Well, because mobile is hard—really, really hard. SAP
focuses on selling SAP, as it should, and
over time, mobile increasingly became a check-box that did not generate a ton
of revenue compared with the hundreds of millions brought in by enterprise
licenses.
The mobile times are changing, though. If this week is any indication, SAP
sure "gets it" now.
"We acquire to move the company forward. With the acquisition of Sybase,
we become No. 1 in mobile solutions," said SAP
Co-CEO Hagemann Snabe during SapphireNow,
held May 17 to 19.
"The acquisition fits into SAP's
overall strategy. They want to lead in ERP, analytics and mobile, and Sybase
fits with the SAP strategy of [on-premises],
on-demand and on-device," said Rich Padula, CEO
of Syclo, one of SAP's co-innovator partners.
SAP,
Sybase and Partners—Cannibalize or Thrive?
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