Walking down the memory lane:
Not 10 years ago, a cellular phone as it was called back then, existed to let you make and take calls, and send SMS (Short Message Service).
Gradually, the functionality expanded to enable users to send and receive electronic mail (e-mail) as well as browse the internet.
Enabling data services on a mobile device was the turning point.
It is no secret that the first company to release a “smartphone” was Apple. The iPhone revolutionized the industry and redefined the purpose of a mobile device. The gestalt of the mobile device was changed forever. That was 2007. Barely 5 years ago.
Fast forward to 2012.
We have multiple players in the mobile space and the market is already mature.
Before we delve into details, I’d like to set the stage.
When we talk Mobility, we’re talking about 3 different aspects:
- The device (hardware)
- The platform (operating system) and
- The apps
With that cleared, let’s look at some general mobile market trends (click image to enlarge):
Source: http://www.webhostingbuzz.com/blog/2011/10/19/mobile-internet-trends/
As you may have observed, this was in 2010 and in less than 2 years, some of the trends have already shifted.
Now, let’s observe recent statistics:
Source: http://mobileorchard.com/android-number-one-in-app-downloads/
But note: number one in app downloads does not mean selling the most number of phones!
Source: http://mobileorchard.com/apple-beats-android-in-fourth-quarter-smartphone-sales/
The battle is undoubtedly between iOS and Android (Mango seems to be doing quite well too). But, to make things a little more complicated, Android is just the platform. The operating system. Various device manufacturers adopt the Android platform, customize the platform and sell their device.
Interestingly, Samsung have ousted Nokia as the world’s biggest phone maker.
Source: http://www.phonearena.com/news/Samsung-is-now-probably-the-worlds-biggest-phone-maker-beating-stumbling-Nokia-in-Q1_id29050
Hopefully, you have a clear picture now of the various levels involved in the Mobility game.
Consumerization of IT:
Many of you have probably come across this term already. But, what is it? What does “Consumerization of IT” mean?
Let me illustrate:
Source: http://www.apple.com/itunes/25-billion-app-countdown/
25 billion app downloads in appx. 4 years.
Source: http://mashable.com/2011/12/06/android-market-10-billion-downloads/
10 billion app downloads in appx. 2 years
What I’m getting at is that the rate of adoption of mobile technology and apps is unprecedented. Never since the early days of Industrialization has any business seen such figures.
With such a vast amount of information at hand and dime-a-dozen apps, the consumer is king again. If an app doesn’t look good, chances are it will fail. It may provide excellent information but the look and feel is equally important.
As an avid app user myself, if I need an “upskilling” to use an app, I simply delete it and look for another.
This behavior is Consumerization of IT. The average user expects the same experience from business software as well.
Mobility in an Enterprise:
Having seen some trends and figures related to consumers, it is absurd to think that Enterprises will have to wait months or years to deploy mobile software before they are productive.
The whole point of mobile is – right here, right now.
SAP are well aware of this and hence the availability of SAP rapid-deployment solutions for mobile.
What are SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions?
As we know, a lot has changed in the last four years, both in the Global economy, as well as how customers view new IT investments.
While it had been an ongoing trend since the dot-com bust, the move away from large, complex projects by businesses was solidified by the risk adverse conditions set in place 2008, and this is something we believe is here to stay.
Customers want to move forward, they want to innovate, but they are only willing to do so in a low-risk, incremental way. This allows the organization to feel the benefits and business impact of new innovations over a shorter period, and before moving on to follow-on areas. While at the same time, it allows the customer to change course where and when necessary, as their overall market or competitive environments change… which we all know can happen quite quickly, both positively and negatively.
The second point is on flexibility & choice. The advent of cloud has brought a whole new level of flexibility and ease of deployment. At the same time, public clouds have their limitations to support complex, industry processes, or transactions where security or massive scalability is a chief factor. Private clouds bring the power of virtualization and infrastructure cost reductions, while on-premise remains a center piece of most enterprise application landscapes, but must meet the expectations of today’s customers to be easy to buy, deploy and use, as is the case in the cloud.
SAP created rapid-deployment solutions to address this need.
These solutions are sold in the form of bite sized chunks called packages.
SAP and our Global Partner Ecosystem offer a comprehensive portfolio of modular, out-of-the box solutions that meet specific business needs. Each rapid-deployment solution is comprised of four basic building blocks:
- Software that is pre-configured so you can address your most urgent business processes – fast.
- Content in the form of SAP best practices, predefined templates and tools to make implementations smoother and solution adoption easier
- End-user enablement such as guides and educational material to speed up adoption
- And a fixed scope implementation services that provide maximum predictability and lowers risk
SAP offers these “rapid-deployment solution packages” for multiple Lines of Business, Industries and Technology topics.
SAP rapid-deployment solutions for mobile:
SAP rapid-deployment solutions for mobile help quickly mobilize your enterprise. These are out of the box prepackaged mobile solutions to increase your employees’ productivity, mobilize your sales force and speed the decision making in your organization. SAP's new Mobile Rapid Deployment Solutions help you quickly and effectively introduce mobility into your IT landscape and cater to different Lines of Business.
With this integrated offering of software, best practices and services, SAP’s mobile platform is deployed quickly into your landscape, so you can immediately start to realize a reduction in cost and improved efficiencies.
The mobile infrastructure deployment is delivered in such a way that allows for easy future expansion and addition of new mobile applications and mobile devices. As and when you choose to do so.
With our mobile rapid-deployment solutions you can:
- Build a scalable platform agnostic mobile infrastructure that allows you to mobilize your business processes in a cost effective way
- Improve business performance
- Deploy prepackaged instant value mobile applications designed to increase your employees’ productivity and responsiveness, shorten workflow cycles, and speed the decision making processes in your organization
- Start with your most urgent mobile needs around a specific line of business such as Sales or Finance and then expand by adding more applications in the future to cover Human Resources, Supply Chain, Procurement and Manufacturing.
Gaining a Predictable Approach:
With our mobile rapid-deployment solutions, you know the cost, scope, and deployment timeframe upfront before the project starts. This approach lowers your implementation risk and eliminates any last minute surprises.
In the Mobile space, we released 4 rapid-deployment solution packages so far:
- SAP rapid-deployment solution for Sysbase Unwired Platform
- SAP rapid-deployment solution for mobile apps and infrastructure
- SAP CRM rapid-deployment solution for Mobile Sales
- SAP Afaria rapid-deployment solution
The SAP CRM rapid-deployment solution for mobile sales brings together software and services that give you essential CRM functionality quickly and affordably through smartphones (iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Tablet). It includes:
Rapid delivery in 8 - 10 weeks, using SAP Consulting or a Partner of your choice.
SAP experts work with you to help you get the solution that meets your needs. The proven methodology clearly outlines goals, expectations, commitments, and timelines, minimizing uncertainty, and streamlining deployment.
Fixed scope implementation. Project scope is fixed to ensure a smooth jump start according to the SAP Rapid Deployment solution promise of fixed scope, time, cost, and quality.
An affordable solution. Pricing is transparent and established upfront. The solution includes affordably priced services.
A clear path to your full mobility vision. If your mobility needs are basic, the SAP CRM rapid-deployment solution for mobile sales can provide a permanent solution to your customer requirements. If your mobility needs are more expansive, this software can lay the foundation for an incremental evolution toward the comprehensive mobility application.
SAP rapid-deployment solution for mobile apps and infrastructure enables the implementation of SAP’s Mobile Platform and one or more Mobile Productivity Apps from SAP for full productive purposes in a fixed time and fixed price. The solution leverages the most recent SAP mobile best practices and thus ensures the most predictable and fastest time to execute on your mobile strategy.
Some business challenges Customers face while deploying apps:
- Mobile applications in the market are mainly standalone point solutions. They address a single business problem on a single handset (iPhone or BlackBerry or Android) and can’t scale in scope to cover multiple business problems in various lines of business across various devices.
- The costs of implementing and managing these point mobile solutions is prohibitively expensive reducing adoption of mobile solutions by enterprises causing companies to miss out on the productivity enhancements that mobility has to offer and reducing their ROI on existing mobile investments.
This rapid-deployment solution helps address these issues:
- SAP rapid-deployment solution for mobile apps and infrastructure consists of instant value mobile applications that touch on multiple LoBs and industries focused on extending corporate applications and business process along with a solid and comprehensive Mobile Platform that allows customers to grow their mobile investments in the future.
- Rapid-deployment solution modular approach allows customers to start with one apps that have immediate need within their organization and then add more apps in the future
This package consists of 25 pre-packaged apps spanning across 7 different LoB’s Customers can choose from, as well as SAP NetWeaver Gateway and SAP Sybase Unwired Platform. For all Mobile Device Management (MDM) needs, Afaria is available as a standalone rapid-deployment solution package and can be bought if the customer wishes to benefit from its prowess.
Some key benefits:
- Make it easy for your employees to work efficiently, wherever they are. This ready-to-deploy solution provides access to prepackaged mobile productivity apps
- Contains fixed time, fixed scope, fixed price implementation using SAP best practices, and access to SAP’s mobile platform of Sybase Unwired Platform and SAP NetWeaver Gateway.
- Enjoy the flexibility to choose apps you need now – and add on as your business grows
- Achieve a faster ROI with best practice guidelines, automation content and pre-configuration that streamline implementation
- Reduces overall deployment and investment risk, ensures solution is properly installed and configured leveraging SAP best practices
- Enables the customer to focus on operations instead of installation
SAP Afaria rapid-deployment solution will be most beneficial if you are looking for a centralized device management solution.
Afaria is the industry leading Mobile Device Management software.
SAP Afaria's software platform delivers centralized control of all mobile devices and tablets including iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry, as well as the apps that run on them.
This solution addresses not only the demand of customers to leverage existing and new technology for their MDM solution for continued cost savings and improvements to service quality and customer satisfaction, but also helps customers to setup new, fast, and lean MDM solutions based on best practices.
By reducing the efforts spent on provisioning, collecting information, and managing mobile devices, you will benefit from improved and automated service delivery that could result in reduced efforts, headcount, and time spent on device management.
You will benefit from reduced operational service delivery risk through faster problem resolution, improved documentation, lower error rates, and less escalations.
Instead of spending your budget for operational issues, you will enable pro-active maintenance of your service delivery processes.
The SAP MDM Afaria 7.0 rapid-deployment solution for IT Management provides the tools to solve complex mobile management task simply and effectively. IT Management has full control of the range of devices and applications deployed.
As the solution comes with a fixed price and a clearly defined baseline scope, it provides cost transparency upfront and reduces your overall implementation and consequently also your investment risk.
SAP rapid-deployment solution for Sybase Unwired Platform enables the implementation of Sybase Unwired Platform and NetWeaver Gateway for full productive purposes in a fixed time and fixed price. The solution leverages the most recent SAP mobile best practices and thus ensures the most predictable and fastest time to execute on your mobile strategy.
Sybase Unwired Platform acts as a hub that connects the back-end enterprise systems and data sources to mobile devices. Features for mobile application development, deployment, security, and ongoing device and application management provide a complete end-to-end solution.
Sybase Unwired Platform helps you do 4 things really well:
- Connect - During development and deployment, connect to your heterogeneous data sources and back-end enterprise systems.
- Create - Use the development tools included with the Sybase Mobile SDK to build and test mobile applications that meet your mobility needs.
- Control - Deploy to and manage Sybase Unwired Platform Runtime, including the runtime environment, end-to-end security, and device applications.
- Consume - Mobile applications install to devices allowing device users to work online and offline. Enterprise data is accessed from a variety of mobile devices.
Some key benefits:
- Reduces overall deployment and investment risk of Sybase Unwired Platform
- Ensures solution is properly installed and configured leveraging SAP best practices
- Enables the customer to focus on operations instead of installation
- Reduces TCO leveraging best practices, automation content and pre-configuration
- Empowers developers by introducing design time best practices and pre-configurations
Closing statements:
I tried to keep the level of detail high enough to cater to all audiences but detailed enough not to sound like fluff.
If you’re a Customer interested in getting to know more about the rapid-deployment solutions for mobile, please get in touch with me (you can post comments/questions below 
).
If you’re a Partner who would like to work with rapid-deployment solutions for mobile, please get in touch with me. We have a simple and efficient Qualification process in place, happy to guide you through.
In the forthcoming weeks we will release further information in the form or articles and radio interviews, do stay tuned.
Last but not least, we are continuously releasing mobile packages to cater to various business needs. We have a quarterly release schedule to ensure rapid delivery of innovations as and when you want them.
For more information about rapid-deployment solutions for mobile, check out these blogs:
Follow SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions on Twitter: @SAPRDS
. I walked into the store and was able to pick out a device based on a few key functions; a sales associate provided migration services to get my contacts, data and pictures to the new phone and then showed me how to actually use the thing. What’s more, it came pre-loaded with about 70% of the applications that I use on a regular basis, and in less than an hour my new phone was configured and ready to go. 
Smartphone companies have made it ridiculously easy for consumers to go mobile. Now, SAP is making it easy for companies to introduce enterprise mobility into their IT landscapes by using a lot of the same concepts. The key is prepackaged, preconfigured solutions – SAP Rapid Deployment solutions - which make it easier to choose the right solution for your business and take the trouble out of getting those to work! SAP Rapid Deployment solutions provide you with the necessary services, end-user enablement, preconfigured applications and content you need to mobilize your business – fast.
That being said, there is a lot to consider when formulating an enterprise mobility strategy. To help you in getting started on your mobility journey, I would recommend watching Realizing Mobility - a series of short, yet very informative videos which do a great job of breaking down a wealth of information into manageable pieces. In this series, mobile thought leaders and experts will help you to better understand the mobile marketplace. You will learn what you need to consider when designing a mobile strategy and hear more about how you can leverage SAP Rapid Deployment solutions for enterprise mobility and other SAP Services to get started in just weeks. 
