.KEYWORD sap
.FLYINGHEAD THE PALMPOWER INTERVIEW
.TITLE PalmPower Interview: inside SAP’s Mobile Business strategy
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
.FEATURE
.SPOTLIGHT FIGALT cover.gif
.SUMMARY Mention enterprise solutions and you’re going to hear the name SAP, the third largest software company in the world. Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz had the opportunity to sit down with Howard Beader, SAP’s Director of Mobile Business, for this exclusive PalmPower Interview.
.EDNOTE Mention enterprise solutions and you’re going to hear the name SAP, the third largest software company in the world. Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz had the opportunity to sit down with Howard Beader, SAP’s Director of Mobile Business, for this exclusive PalmPower Interview.
.Q DG
Can you give us some background about SAP?
.A HB
SAP has been around for about 25 years. We are now the third largest software company in the world. Our specialty is in enterprise computing. Basically, any application that an enterprise needs to run its business is delivered by SAP. So, we cover not only the historical ERP (Enterprise Research Product), which is what many customers have known us for, in the past, but also CRM (Customer Relationship Management), SCM (Supply Chain Management), and BI (Business Intelligence) with our data warehousing product.
.CALLOUT Palm is one of the most important partners that we’re working with today in the mobile space.
Our newest offering and probably our biggest news of late is our portal offering, via SAP Portals. It’s a new company that we just formed through an acquisition of a company called TopTier, which was one of the leading visionaries in the portal space and a strategic partner with Yahoo!. So now, SAP Portals and Yahoo! go to market together with one enterprise portal offering.
But what we’re going to be talking about today is SAP Mobile Business and our products within that and how that fits within the world of enterprise computing.
.CALLOUT SAP is really about business cooperation between the different functional areas.
.Q DG
Tell us about your role at SAP and what your areas of responsibility are.
.A HB
Basically, in the Americas, all product management, development, product marketing, marketing communications, and so on, feed into my team for coordination of all our mobile business aspects. So, although my team does not have direct responsibility for sales, because our different regions do that, we do work with sales. We support our customers, both from a first customer shipment standpoint, all the way through to insuring that they’re happy and reference-able users of Mobile Business.
.Q DG
SAP is very much a global business, isn’t it?
.A HB
Yes. SAP is headquartered, globally, in Germany, where most of our development actually occurs today. From a mobile perspective, it gives us a much more global view on things than most of our competitors within this space. We have a development team in Germany, a development team in Israel, a development team in India, and a development team in Tokyo, as well as here in the Americas. We have a global view on what’s happening from a technology standpoint.
.Q DG
So, that would make SAP the largest software company headquartered outside the US, wouldn’t it?
.A HB
Yes.
.Q DG
How did SAP get to be so successful? What was the compelling area of business that made you grow so quickly?
.A HB
SAP was one of the first, if not the first, company to really integrate all the business processes across different components within the organization. So, no longer was the sales order process isolated. It was tied into finance, and that was tied into inventory and the business processes behind there. That inter-organizational collaboration, along with our approach of a three-tier architecture, really propelled SAP over the years into the leading position as the lead ERP, or enterprise software vendor, in the world.
.Q DG
You just used the term "three-tier architecture." Can you explain that?
.A HB
In the past, systems all ran on a big mainframe computer back in the data center, and the desktop was really a dumb terminal that responded back and forth. So, these big systems got larger and larger and larger. What SAP was able to do was split the architecture so that we have the database server (which had the list of your customer names, etc.), and then we had an application server on top of that (which did the processing and the "crunching") and actually sent the information back and forth between the third tier (which was your desktop).
And now, with Mobile Business, we actually have the ability to extend that beyond the desktop to any mobile device.
.Q DG
What’s the typical size of an enterprise that takes advantage of your products? Are we talking about Fortune 500 or are we talking about smaller businesses?
.A HB
Typically, our customer base today is definitely the Fortune 1000. But, beyond that, SAP has grown considerably in the small to medium business market. We actually have a fairly large organization here, focused on just that market. So, that’d be the companies in the $20 to $50 million in total revenue range. And we do have a fairly large presence in that space at this point.
.CALLOUT As long as you have our latest version of the Workplace platform and ITS (Internet Transaction Server), you have mobile access as standard to the Palm OS platform.
.Q DG
Let’s talk about mobile technology. Why is mobile important?
.A HB
Mobile’s important for a couple of reasons. Today the sales and service people on the road are requesting it; they’re demanding it. It’s a required part of the business to stay competitive in the industry. The other aspect is it’s the next wave. We’ve gone from basic Web functionality as the craze, to e-commerce, and that was the huge next step over the last couple of years. Now, we’re heading into the mobile wave, and we’re just at the tip of the whole iceberg . To use something that we had in one of our own publications recently, we’re just entering the "mobile tsunami."
.Q DG
Now obviously, when you talk about something like the next wave, one of the first things that comes to mind is fads. Artificial intelligence was a "next wave" for a while in the 80s. It’s found a home, but it’s obviously not a key element of other business. How is this a "tsunami," but not a fad?
.A HB
We’ve got compelling ROI (Return on Investment), that’s being justified, behind the applications that are being deployed today. For instance, consider a delivery driver that’s out on the road making beverage deliveries; there’s no way for him to be able to do his job, print invoices, and delivery quantities of different types of packages without being able to have a device he can use to do that remotely. If he can do this while he’s on the road it’s going to save time, and it’s going to keep the information more accurate. And, just to stay competitive, we need to be able to do that. So, that’s one reason that we do have the applications already available and the users demanding it.
Second, we’re not talking about just one vendor or a couple of vendors here. The enterprise software companies have all recognized the need. SAP’s in the lead here because I think we’ve taken a different approach than others. But, our competitors are also out there, mobilizing their applications.
And, it’s not just about the software application providers or the hardware providers, but we also have the telephone companies out there, enabling their wireless framework so that we can support much, much faster connections, as well as online, all the time, connectivity. As all of these converge over the next couple of years, the demand is growing and driving that, so that we’ll come to a period where this is just expected.
We’ve seen the demand. For instance, look at some of the stories that have been in some of the papers over the last few weeks. They’re calling the people "addicts" now because they’re hooked on wireless email, and they can’t get away from wireless. It’s part of their job, and they wouldn’t know how to function without it. And, these aren’t just your typical sales and service folks, but these are CEOs of major corporations. As the devices and the connectivity converge it’s going to become pervasive out there.
.CALLOUT Palm, as the leading provider of handheld devices in the industry, is in a great position to actually move forward into the enterprise space.
.Q DG
This gives us a great opportunity to segue into Palm and the Palm relationship. Tell us a little bit about the relationship between SAP and Palm.
.A HB
Palm, as the leading provider of handheld devices in the industry, is in a great position to actually move forward into the enterprise space. We’ve been working with Palm now for about a year and a half, developing a joint enterprise strategy to target the enterprise space. I can’t give you all the information, quite yet, but there’re some great things in the works.
.Q DG
Obviously, you guys will keep us informed, and write about it, in depth, as time goes on.
.A HB
Definitely.
.Q DG
What excites you most about the relationship right now?
.A HB
Besides great people on both sides, working on a joint cause
