Over its 40 years, German enterprise software giant SAP (SAP) has signed up 35 million end users to its traditional enterprise solutions. In the last 15 months, SAP said it has attracted 60 million users to its mobile platform.
A quick analysis on these numbers points to the huge potential mobile tools can provide to IT companies such as SAP, which for its recent past has targeted its efforts beyond traditional enterprise resource planning and moving toward mobile, big data and cloud computing, as RCR Wireless News previously reported.
Besides being a key pillar to SAP’s future growth, mobile platforms is also an important part of its global strategy to reach 1 billion users for its solutions by 2015.
“We are going to achieve this goal through mobility,” noted the company’s VP André Petroucic, during a press conference held in São Paulo.
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SAP said it is moving several applications to become mobile-ready. “Mobile devices surpassed PC as equipment used to access data analysis, but it didn’t exceed yet the PC on creating data,” explained Petroucic, noting the next growth cycle will include using mobile devices to not only visualize information, but to generate data.
“Mobility must to become an enterprise culture. People need to take decisions through a mobile platform from wherever they are,” Frederico Vilar, Neoris Brazil’s president told RCR Wireless News. Headquartered in Miami, and with operations in the United States, Europe, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, Neoris is a global business and IT consulting company specializing in providing application outsourcing services and solutions in support of SAP application.
SAP is not the only IT company that is moving in this direction. As part of its most recent purchase of Israeli-based Worklight, a provider of mobile software for smartphones and tablets, IBM cited plans to expand its operations into mobile application development, integration security and management.
“Mobility is the greatest platform to address future needs,” noted Petroucic.
Indeed, Sybase’s purchase has really contributed to SAP moving forward with its mobile strategy. Sybase’s integration with SAP is set to be completed this year. “We moved from zero applications to 200 in 2011, and the goal is to achieve more than 1,000 this year,” noted Petroucic, during the SAP Forum event, held this week in São Paulo. Of this 1,000, Mark HJ Crofton, VP, mobility for Latin America at SAP, said about 805 will be unveiled through partners
Some results of SAP’s efforts are starting to appear. Its Brazilian operation closed 2011 with 66% of total software revenues coming from mobility and analytics solutions, and in memory computing, “which is pretty much beyond basics ERP,” noted SAP’s Brazil CEO Luís César Verdi.
The company said its goal is to triple its revenue in Brazil between 2010-2014. Verdi noted that to this point the subsidiary has achieved 52% of its target.
