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Former Member
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Most companies, that offer mobile solutions for SAP, are following the same concept: Write the application ones and run it on all mobile platforms out of the box. This is of course great! You save a lot of time and money. Some people like Kevin Benedict call this a "user friendly, graphically rich, template based rapid application development environment for enterprises".

This type of development is most of the time done in a proprietary tool by either drag ‘n’ drop or by writing in a proprietary scripting language/XML format. Which leads us to the first drawback of this approach: You need special skills to do this. Skills that you cannot find on the market. And if you can, these experts are rare and therefore expensive. If you train your in-house stuff, they can use their new skills only for this one platform - they can't be re-used for anything else. If you decide to use a different technology in the future, you flushed your money down the toilet.

There is even one company that is praising itself because to develop on their platform, you only need SAP skills - sure, because SAP experts are sooo cheap. For me, this is not a selling point, but it is a huge drawback of this platform!

Then there is a second group of mobile enterprise frameworks: The ones like Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP) from Sybase, which allow you to work with the native development tools and languages of the target platform. C#/.Net for Windows Mobile, Java for Blackberry/Android and Objective-C for iPhone/iPad - just to name a few.

The first benefit of this approach is clear: There are many skilled Java, .Net and Objective-C developers out there. You can find them on every street corner and they have years of experience. And they are also cheaper!

Still - if you have to develop an application only once and you are able to run it on iPhone, Android and Blackberry, you save money, even if the developer is more expensive. True - but do you always need to deploy on multiple platforms?

But all this is not the most important reason why you should go with native solutions. The main reason is usability! Only native applications can use all features of the underlying platform. Only native applications look, feel and behave like the device, on which they are running. If you have a proprietary language or a drag and drop tool, you are not able to use all those great native libraries that are available for Java and C#. You are very limited! I worked with tools like this; I know what I talk about! On the Blackberry, the apps did not look like Blackberry apps, on Android they did not look like Android apps and on the iPhone ... on the iPhone they looked just horrible (no scrolling, no date picker, ...). It was a pain to have great ideas, but a platform that is too limited to implement them. The platform was not able to satisfy the customer (a big international telco), so he switched to a different solution.

With a native platform however ... Here you can use everything and you have no limits! On Windows Mobile for example you have many ISV's who offer .Net controls. These controls can be included in your application without problems. If you would need to write these UI elements yourself, you would need to invest hundreds of person days. On Blackberry and Android you can benefit from the full power of Java and the countless open source libs that are available. With native clients, only the sky is the limit!

Just compare what there is available in the SAP area for the iPhone. Look at the native CRM Mobile Sales solution from Sybase and compare it with the recently announced application from their competition. While the Sybase app looks great and works like an iPhone app should work, the other solution just does not look right. I bet with you that their "user friendly, graphically rich, template based rapid application development environment" will never be able to create applications like the one from Sybase!

I really like this quote from Steve Jobs about iPhone applications because it summarizes everything I believe in:

"We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features."

For myself, usability is the top priority of mobile solutions and it is clear for me that you can only reach truly perfect applications if you develop them with the tools for the target device.

"Write once, run everywhere" is a cute idea, but it is simple not working and I do not see that change in the future. Because of this I am glad that SAP acquired Sybase, a company that allows their customers and partners to write native applications!

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