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dbthi
Advisor
Advisor

As part of the SAP Integration and Certification Center, I have the opportunity to collaborate with various SAP partners and third-party vendors who enrich and contribute to the ever growing SAP Partner Ecosystem by integrating their solutions with SAP platforms. This is especially true in the area of mobility with the recent launch of SMP 3.0, SAP's flagship enterprise mobility platform. This release promised exciting new features and a unified platform to simplify the development process. In an effort to shed some light on this, I have reached out to some very early adopters of this new platform so they can share their mobile app development experience on SMP 3.0.

In the second installment of this series, I will be having a Q&A session with Venkata Raju, the Mobility Architect for Innovapptive, one of the first SAP mobile partners to have successfully achieved a certified integration of their mobile app running on SMP 3.0, SAP’s flagship enterprise mobile platform.



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Please tell us about Innovapptive

Innovapptive is a SAP services partner, a provider of cloud based mobile application management platform, SAP-certified mobile apps, and a 2014 SAP Pinnacle Award finalist. Our company offers an array of SAP products and services that enable enterprise mobility for SAP Customers. Innovapptive’s products, the mPower App Suite, mPower App Store, and the mPower Mobile Platform, provide customers a comprehensive portfolio of end-to-end solutions to instantly take their enterprise mobile. The team at Innovapptive brings a unique and unparalleled combination of SAP, mobile and industry experience to transform and empower customers. Innovapptive’s customers are some of the world’s leading Global 2000 companies.

Can you tell us about the various SAP technologies you use?

We are laser focused on achieving "Instant Mobilization" for enterprises, through our bundled SAP certified mobile solutions. Our bundled SAP certified mobile solutions include 50+ SAP certified mobile solutions, SAP Run-Time Licenses for the SAP Mobile Platform, a Private Enterprise Branded App Store, App Security Wrappers using Mocana and Implementation and Customization Solutions for Fiori, SAP UI5 and Syclo Mobile Apps. We also provide Mobile solutions on the Hana platform. Our high quality and cost effective SAP Mobile solutions have accelerated large Global 2000 customers’ time to market and value.

How would you describe your company’s enterprise mobility initiative?

Innovapptive founders envisioned how revolutionary technologies such as cloud and mobile had the potential of innovating and transforming their customers' business processes delivering significant value. They saw the tremendous potential of mobile introducing new business processes while redefining existing business processes, resulting in incredible growth in employee productivity and business efficiency, which was unthinkable just a few years ago. Although they saw the tremendous potential with this technology in the enterprise, they recognized that the Traditional IT strategies, of developing and supporting technology solutions in-house to satisfy the business needs, were no longer being well received by the business community. While most solution providers were focused on building a mobile application development platform for enterprises, our founders recognized the need to identify, design and build value-driven mobile business solutions that can run on these mobile platforms and instantly cater to actual business problems and meet business demand for "Instant Mobilization" and rapid ROI.

How did your company get started on SMP/SUP?

Given our decades of experience with SAP solutions, our SAP partnership and our vision for ‘Instant Mobilization’ in the enterprise, our company started building value driven compelling mobile solutions on SUP in alignment with SAP’s strategy and roadmap. We have been participating as a key SAP partner in ramp-up programs and platform testing.

What motivated you to jump onboard SMP 3.0?

SMP 3.0 has great features and tools to enable mobile apps and provide valuable mobile solutions for Enterprises. The key feature which motivated us to jump onboard SMP 3.0 is Offline OData capabilities and also the OData SDK improvements compared with older SUP versions.

Tell us about the Mobile Sales Execution app your team has developed for SMP 3.0. Who is it for and what are the benefits?

Mobile Sales Execution app from Innovapptive empowers enterprise field sales reps and managers with the necessary information and tools to increase efficiency of field sales execution. This native mobile application enhances productivity of the sales rep by providing critical insights into sales execution and increases revenue of customer and retail store visits. By providing anywhere, anytime access to relevant information and functions from mobile devices, enterprises can ensure that the field sales reps and managers are executing brand and product strategies, tactics and objectives in a consistent and reliable way. The sales reps and managers using this app will also have the ability to view customer fact sheets, sales history, orders, invoices and process new sales orders in a very easy and intuitive way.

Can you describe how you designed the app and your choice of technologies? For example, you went from an MBO-based approach to OData. How was the transition?

We used SMP 3.0 and SAP Gateway with OData services. The transition is very smooth from SMP OData SDK and the development of services involved some additional effort. We experienced an improved performance on our Mobile App.

Tell us about your migration experience going from SUP 2.1 to SMP 3.0. What were the biggest challenges?

Installation is performed on a separate instance and it is mostly straight forward similar to SUP. OData Native SDK Migration is a bit challenging as it has new API's with SMP3.0. The registration process is different. Synchronization process for supporting offline capabilities is a big value addition for OData based apps.

Which new feature(s) of SMP 3.0 do you like the most?

Offline capabilities of SMP3.0 and Integration Gateway

How would you compare your team’s experience developing mobile apps on this new version of SMP 3.0 versus the older one?

SMP 3.0 Native SDK is developer friendly to quickly enable integration with OData services compared with SMP 2.3 Native OData SDK. The build time with SMP 3.0 was reduced by around 20 % compared with SMP 2.3 Native OData SDK.

What tips can you provide others who plan on porting their app to SMP 3.0, if any?

Relay Server is not supported with SMP3.0.Instead, use Apache Reverse Proxy server for Relay Server capabilities. Delta Query is still not supported for JSON to implement offline capabilities. Make use of Integration Gateway to communicate with Non-SAP data sources or if you have multiple data sources for the same application.

How was your experience with the mobile app certification process?

Our experience with the Mobile App certification process was extremely satisfactory and smooth. The SAP ICC team was very knowledgeable, experienced and were very supportive during the entire process and helped us meet our deadlines.

Do you think that the certification process allowed you to align with SAP in a technical way?

Absolutely, the certification process allowed us to align with SAP in a technical way.

Do you think that certification process promotes better quality apps?

We believe that the certification process absolutely promotes better quality of mobile apps. It provides us and our customers the assurance of high quality and excellence of solutions.

To conclude, can you share some final thoughts about your experience?

Our experience overall has been excellent and we thank SAP for delivering a much superior SMP product and ICC team for all the support and guidance throughout the certification process.

Thank you !

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This concludes our Q&A session.Thank you Venkata for sharing your valuable insights and experience with the SAP Community!

Please find the list of useful links below. If you want to learn more about the mobile app certification, please contact the SAP Integration and Certification Center to understand the services we offer to facilitate integration with SAP.

Useful Links

About Innovapptive:

About the mobile app certification on SMP 3.0:

If you would like to see more blogs like this, please comment below or use the like button if the information presented here was of interest. Thank you!