eric.lai

    September 2011 Previous month Next month

    Jeff Bezos has the soul of a tightfisted Taiwanese factory owner. I hope I'm allowed to say this, being Taiwanese-American myself, and also because I say it in full admiration of Amazon's CEO for the coming $199 Kindle Fire tablet.

    Let me explain. Taiwan and China's rise in the last two decades as the world's leading mass manufacturer for, well, almost everything, is due to the energy, discipline and, let's face it, penny-pinching ways of everyone in the supply chain, especially the factory bosses, who even in mainland China remain predominantly Taiwanese.

    It's these guys, not Andy Grove or Steve Jobs, who do the dirty work enabling miracles like the fact that the today's computers cost the same as they did 25 years ago and yet are many tens of thousands of times more powerful.*

    They do this by selling at razor-thin margins and betting on volume to eventually take them into the black. That's long been Bezos strategy, going back to the dot-com era when Amazon was growing like a weed but still losing money.

    So Amazon may very well lose $50 for each of the first several million Kindle Fires it sells, as various Wall Street analysts predict. But at that bold price point, it is very likely to sell tens of millions of Kindle Fires. And, of course, there are those millions of Amazon e-books, movies and music downloads to sell you...

    How bold is $199 for the Kindle Fire? Not only is it 60% cheaper than   the $499 iPad 2, but it is 33% less than the now-$299 BlackBerry   PlayBook (which debuted only 6 months ago at $499). The PlayBook, like  the Kindle Fire, runs Android, is made by the same Taiwanese manufacturer (Quanta) and sports nearly identical hardware to the Kindle Fire,  down to the 1 MHz TI OMAP dual-core processor. The Kindle will run  Android apps on launch, while the PlayBook, based on BlackBerry's QNX OS,  still cannot.

    Six months ago, I predicted that the tablet market was set to split into three segments: A high-end enterprise segment with the Cisco Cius and the Avaya Flare, a media tablet segment with the iPad, PlayBook, Xoom, Galaxy Tab and others, and a 'FeatureTablet' segment comprising lesser-known vendors like Archos and Chinese off-brand Shanzhai makers, and limited-use e-readers like the Kindle or Nook.

    Similar to FeaturePhones, I figured FeatureTablets would appeal to price-sensitive mainstream consumers, especially with their $100-300 price tags. They would mostly run Android, sport single-core ARM chips, relatively-short battery life (think 4-5 hours), inferior touchscreens (stylus, anyone?), and often a poor selection of apps (subsets of the Google Android Market or, in the case of e-readers, none at all).

    The Kindle Fire throws gasoline on the whole FeatureTablet category and sets it ablaze. Why would you buy a cheap $140 Coby from Walgreens when for $60 more you can get what just 6 months ago was the most powerful tablet around? Especially when you'll get access to millions of e-book, video, music and even app content via Amazon's on-demand stores. Granted, these aren't free, but neither are most good apps.

    Amazingly, the $199 Kindle Fire is Amazon's high-end model. Other more traditional (i.e. e-reader) models will be priced at $189, $139 and $109 (without ads - with ads pushed to you, they get as cheap as $79).

    The Kindle Fire is strictly a consumer device. It won't make any inroads into big business. As Forrester's Sarah Rotman Epps blogged, "we won’t see companies like GE and Mercedes Benz deploy the Kindle Fire for their enterprises the way they have with the iPad."

    Nor do I expect the Kindle Fire to push Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend forward the way the iPad has.  And it is far from an iPad 2 killer, though I think it likely will accelerate Apple's release of a lower-priced iPad to compete with it (does $300 sound reasonable to you? Does to me).

    While the Kindle Fire destroys the chances of most low-end makers, I think it will still accelerate the tablet market overall by introducing millions of people to them. These people will eventually add or trade up to more full-fledged tablets that they'll want to tote into work. In this way, many vendors will benefit, as well as apps makers, and the enterprise mobility market will continue to grow.

     

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    * The downside, of course, is some/many of these factories are sweatshops with terrible conditions, conditions bad enough that there were a spate of suicides at Apple's chief supplier, Foxconn, in 2010 and this year. On the other hand, most of these jobs pay far better than their alternatives, like farming.

    Last year, I wrote a blog entitled "Thar's Gold in Them Thar iPhone Apps." I argued that a Gold Rush was coming in mobile apps, pointing to the example of a game developer who was successfully charging $1,000 an hour for his services. 

    Of course, I only really meant consumer apps.  To argue last year that mobile enterprise apps was the next Big Thing would've been premature, and let's face it, dishonest. The infrastructure was lacking. And neither the supply nor the demand was there.

    The pieces of the enterprise mobility jigsaw puzzle have fallen rapidly into place this year.

    Let's take infrastructure first. Version 2.0 of the Sybase  Unwired Platform introduced in the spring brought two huge improvements.  First, it made mobile development accessible to tens of millions of Web  developers. Second, it introduced hybrid Web containers. Using SUP's  middleware layer, hybrid Web apps offer rich, native app functionality  with the quick development time (and easy portability) of a  browser-based Web app.

    Version 2.1 of SUP, introduced on Tuesday, extends this a couple of ways.  First, it introduces a standalone SDK (Software Developers Kit) as part  of SUP that provides even more tools and pre-built components to get  rich apps up and running faster. Second, it introduces an OData SDK for  developers to more easily create lightweight Web-based apps (think HR  approvals like expenses or vacations) that can nevertheless quickly link  to SAP server apps using the SAP Gateway.

    The latest version of the market-leading Afaria device management platform also now manages billing and deployment of apps from Apple's new Business-focused App Store, aka the Volume Purchase Program for Businesses. This had been a subtle but omnipresent pain point for IT managers.

    Let's also tackle the issue of supply. There will be more than  50 apps available from SAP and partners by year end, said Nick Brown,  senior vice-president for strategy in SAP's mobile applications unit,  during a panel I hosted on Tuesday at TechEd. These include the very-impressive Electronic Medical Records (EMR) app aimed at doctors and set for release later this fall.

    While at least 19 of them will come from Walldorf, the majority will  come from partners. Partners like Cognizant, the $5-billion-a-year  multinational technology services provider. Cognizant is about to  release an HR app built using SUP 2.0. This will compete with the 16-odd  HR apps SAP has already confirmed as being part of its latest batch of  apps. But Girish Ogirala, director of the mobility practice at  Cognizant, isn't worried. Companies like his that are closer to  customers and specific industry verticals will have no problem  out-hustling SAP, he said during the same panel as Brown. Brown smiled -  but didn't protest.

    And that's it: While building apps would seem to pit SAP/Sybase  against the very developers it wants to lure as SUP customers/partners,  that has stopped leading ISVs such as IBM, Accenture, Deloitte, CSC, Infosys, Wipro, Tata, Cap Gemini and others from building apps on SUP.  In part that's because SAP is doing its best to downplay that  conflict. For instance, SAP is developing a mobile app store for launch  in the first quarter of next year. SAP and partner apps will get equal  billing, says Brown.

    Indeed, Brown said that while SAP is committed to  selling the apps it developers (unlike in the past when it bundled some  for free along with its server applications), it might conceivably one day give  away SUP for free - if the market required it.

    Gold? I came to this thar Valley looking for Silicon!* 

    How about customer demand? While not yet mainstream by any  stretch, companies are deploying apps. According to one survey, 86% of  Fortune 50 firms already offer mobile apps. Another survey by Kelton  Research found that 20% of firms were planning to deploy more than 20 apps this year.

    General Mills, Tellabs, Home Depot, P&G, Halliburton and  Rubbermaid are among the companies running mobile apps using SUP. Or how  about Nongfu Spring Co. Ltd., the largest bottled water maker in China? The company has deployed SAP HANA in its back-end to calculate the time and cost of delivering new  shipments. What took 24 hours running an Oracle database takes only 37  seconds with HANA.

    But real-time is wasted if you can't deliver that  info anywhere. So Nongfu is arming 8,000 of its field sales reps with  mobile devices and apps that will be able to call up that information  for customers in, as noted, less than a minute.

    I'm not saying 2011 - or even 2012 - is the year that enterprise  mobility goes mainstream and mobile ISVs reap the benefits. But before  you can pan for gold, you need to buy your mule and pickax and pick the  spot where you plan to panhandle. For developers who want to get in on the enterprise gold rush, that time is now.

    I went to a Tech Ed (note the space, we'll get back to that)  conference once in my past life as a Microsoft beat reporter. It was a  HUGE confab for the Microsoft faithful - Visual Studio banners adorned  the walls - held in the gargantuan cement box known as the Los Angeles  Convention Center.

    My feet felt sore for three straight days. I can't even imagine what  torture it was for the high-heeled women - and there were some there,  surprisingly - in attendance.  With Microsoft Tech Ed feeling like a New Year's Eve in Times Square, I was initially hoping that next week's SAP TechEd in the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas would feel like a smallish dinner party by comparison. I'm not optimistic.

    (Side note: How did my parent company and Redmond to   erect a truce  over the nearly-identical names of their technical conferences  (Microsoft, as noted above, puts a space between the two abbreviated  words, while SAP does not)? Especially since the firms   compete in  enterprise software and for the hearts and minds of tens of   thousands  of the same developers? Especially since the conferences were    reportedly started only TWO YEARS APART from each other (1993 for Microsoft's Technical Education conference, 1995 for SAP's).    Can a nearly-imperceptible difference really be enough to prevent the  lawyers from being   unleashed? Am I kicking a hornet's nest/picking a  scab by mentioning   this? Should I stop with the rhetorical questions already????)

    SAP TechEd is expected to draw 16,000 attendees this year. Granted,  that's spread across four events: after Vegas, TechEd will hit  Bangalore, Madrid and then Beijing. But Vegas remains the big draw.

    Moreover, TechEd 2011 will, for the first time, include Sybase's user and developer conference, TechWave.  This will only boost the overall attendance. If you're coming, expect  to learn about everything from scalability improvements in the ASE  database to the latest boosts to the pattern-recognition features of  analytics server Sybase IQ, to the latest mobile commerce offerings from  Sybase 365.

    The theme of this year's TechEd is gamification, or what I  call "developers putting explosion sounds into spreadsheets apropos of  nothing". TOTALLY KIDDING. As someone who is both easily bored and  instinctively competitive, I'm totally in favor of techniques that make  work more interesting and fun.

    Anyway, there is plenty to see surrounding enterprise mobility. Here's a preview.

    (Side note 2: If you're not coming to Vegas, there are many ways to keep up to date:

    You can also come to SAP TechEd in Asia and elsewhere, or the SAP World Tour 2011 events.)

    1) 110+ mobile-related sessions. Here's the list for TechWave and the list for TechEd.  If you're an analyst or SAP Mentor or journalist, chances are that you're invited to Tuesday afternoon's mobility panel.

    I'll be moderating a group of experts including Nick Brown, senior vice-president for strategy in SAP's Mobile Applications Unit, Himagiri Mukkamala, senior director of engineering for Sybase on its Sybase Unwired Platform and Girish Ogirala,  director of the mobility practice for Cognizant, the $5-billion-a-year  IT services provider. Expect an interesting debate around apps,  platforms and more.

    2) SUP 2.1 news. It's no surprise that  Sybase will be unveiling improvements to the Sybase Unwired Platform  (SUP) at TechEd, in particular with the SDK. The SDK is significant, as  important as SUP 2.0's debut of hybrid Web containers for easy cross-platform development at SAPPHIRE just 4 months earlier.

    SUP, if you hadn't heard, is being embraced by customers - nearly half a billion dollars worth of business in a year, as ZDNet's Dennis Howlett revealed this week.  it's fast becoming the middleware of choice for enterprise app  development.

    3) Appjam. One of the criticisms levied by lighterweight,  cloud-based competitors is that SUP is hard to learn and deploy.  Increasingly, that charge doesn't stick. Witness the Mobility InnoJam held by SAP earlier this summer. SUP newbies were writing true,  working, cross-platform apps running on SUP in a matter of hours. 

    According to SAP Mobility InnoJam – Palo Alto, CA, the winning app was mostly written in just 4 hours.  There will also be an InnoJam at  TechEd. The coding will take place in the 20-something hours between  10:30 pm Sunday night and Monday night 7:00 pm, fueled by ungodly  amounts of junk food, no doubt.

    The winners of the even more prestigious  Demo Jam will  be announced on Tuesday night. The winner of the earlier SAP Mobility  Innojam, the awesomely-named Awesome Service Notification Management app  built by developers from Intel, Genentech and IGT, is one of the  finalists for Demo Jam. Sybase will also announce the winner of its  Mobility Innovation Award, which I've heard is an Israeli startup.

    So for those who interested in the best that the SAP ecosystem has to  offer, there will be plenty to see. And as at SAPPHIRE, expect SAP at  TechEd to show off the apps it is developing in-house, such as in the  areas of field service, retail, and human resources.

    4) Enterprise App Store. Sybase Afaria - which repeated again for the tenth year in the row as the mobile device management (MDM) market leader, according to IDC - is the third part of SAP's mobility story. Look for a new tie-up between Afaria and Apple's new Volume Purchase Programing for Businesses that will make it even easier for IT to manage app deployment.

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    On a related note, the September issue of the Enterprise Mobility newsletter from SAP and Sybase is out. Below's a snapshot of the latest issue. You can subscribe here.

    Healthcare is one of the industries where mobility is making the biggest impact (insurance, financial services and education are some of the others). And I'm not just talking about Big Pharma and medical vendors arming their salespeople with tablets.

    Though that certainly has happened. Vendors that have deployed hundreds or thousands of iPads installed with marketing and CRM apps to the field include Medtronic, Abbott  Laboratories, Boston Scientific, Otsuka, Zimmer and Life Technologies.

    But salespeople in every industry are going mobile. What's distinctive is how mobile is transforming how healthcare providers interact with patients. Within 9 months of the iPad's initial release, almost a quarter of U.S. doctors were using them. By the end of this year, about four out of ten will own them, according to another survey.

    Institution-wise, Ottawa Hospital is deploying 2,300 iPads for clinical use, while Victoria Hospitals (Australia is deploying 600 iPads to its medical staff. Other adopters include Cedars-Sinai, Kaiser-Permanente, Kaweah Delta, Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston, University of Chicago Medical Center, and many others.

    Much of the usage today is ad hoc: doctors can handwrite diagnostic notes or access some patient records via their tablets. Even in these limited use cases, it's proven useful.

    But what if there was an app that provided a 360-degree, unified view into a patient's medical history, medications, X-rays, and vital signs? That's what SAP's coming Electronic Medical Records (EMR) app provides.  Jan Korten, a solutions manager at SAP, and Thilo Berndt, the product development manager for SAP's mobile healthcare apps, debuted the EMR app during an August 31 Webinar.

    You can watch the 1-hour presentation and slides here. But in the meantime, here's an illustrated summary of what they covered.

    Ten SAP developers in Europe have been working on the EMR app for the past 3 months. Just finished, the app - iPad today, Android tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab tomorrow - is about to be piloted by a trio of European hospitals and then released at the end of October, says Korten.

    Above is the central dashboard of the EMR app. From it, doctors - and, in future versions, nurses - have quick access to patient records, a list of medicines taken, pictures of X-rays, medical allergies and even a real-time view of vital signs.

    There's a lot of talk about how a smooth, slick user interface is an important competitive advantage. In healthcare, however, an easy-to-use, powerful UI is mission-critical. While doctors are often very gadget-y, they are also impatient and too busy to deal with a lot of training. An intuitive UI that easily delivers the right information can actually "save lives," says Korten, a former doctor  himself.

    Here is the Vital Signs screen. Doctors can see which indicators are out of normal range (in red), and zoom in and out of the data. The data is sent real-time via Wi-Fi. Indeed, most of the data displayed by 1.0 version of the EMR app is streamed directly from the server, with only small amounts encrypted and cached on the iPad itself, according to Berndt.

    The next version will use the Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP) middleware to store more data locally for offline access, handy when doctors are in network "dead spots" within a hospital. It will also be able to download data via 3G.

    Doctors can view patient x-rays today. Future versions may let doctors take photos with the iPad and upload them to the patient records database, said Korten. Indeed, while v1.0 of the EMR app is basically read-only, future versions will be fully two-way, letting doctors (and nurses) enter diagnostic notes, capture vital sign data, and more.

    Here's the high-level technical architecture: app running on multiple devices (some now, some later), multiple applications and data sources on the back-end, and the SAP Mobility Platform in the middle. This lets the devices access servers via one of three ways: SUP, SAP Gateway, and Netweaver.

    SAP today ties into Siemens' i.s.h. medical records platform. According to Korten, the roadmap includes the ability to tie into Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) and Lab results databases built by 3rd parties.

    And here's the high-level architecture, from a business point-of-view. According to Korten, this provides business opportunities for independent developers and SAP partners: adapters that connect 3rd-party medical server applications and databases to the SAP Mobility middleware, or other mHealth apps that rely on SAP Mobility middleware to tie into multiple back-end data sources.

    Even before the release of the EMR app, SAP had already developed the Collaborative eCare app. While EMR is aimed at doctors, Collaborative eCare is used by caregivers in conjunction with patients suffering chronic diseases such as diabetes or congestive health failure.

    Because their diseases are often so long-lasting, patients typically must endure many appointments with their doctors to finetune their treatments. These can be lengthy and inconvenient for both parties. Calling and e-mailing their doctor or nurse can save some time, but result in patient data scattered all over the place.

    With Collaborative eCare app, patients can upload data on their symptoms and medicines taken to their doctors while at home. Doctors can adjust dosages and change prescriptions and set reminders for patients to take their medicines via the app. Alerts can even be sent via text message to the patients.

    Here's a video explaining more in-depth how Collaborative eCare works.