Apple and SAP Announce New Enterprise Partnership

[dk001]

What you're saying seems to be backing up what I'm saying, though. SAP not having a usable iOS tool but working on Windows is a good reason for an enterprise to buy a Surface over an iPad, but unless SAP has working Windows Phone (or Android, or even Blackberry) tools, it also means that SAP just doesn't work well on any phone.

Do they? Does SAP have Windows Phone or other non-iOS handheld platform tools? Not a rhetorical question, I don't use it and maybe they do.

But if not, it would stand to reason to want to build good tools for whatever the most popular phone platform among your users is, which in the US for enterprise is unquestionably iPhone. And even if they do, given the relative popularity of iPhone it's still to their advantage to have good iOS tools, since it means that either people don't have to carry two phones (a personal iPhone and a corporate Windows Phone for SAP use) or they can not be stuck with an unpopular, poorly-adopted phone platform.

At the very least, there are no technical hurdles to having a completely MS-based backend and desktop platform with a robust iOS-based mobile platform regardless of scale. It's just a matter of having tools that connect well.

If this does work out, it could certainly make for a big selling point for iPads at the corporate level, as well.

We are kind of playing around the same thoughts...
SAP currently does not have decent mobile tool structure for any OS that I have seen. There have been some endeavors but it is very niche oriented.
One of the ongoing challenges has been that SAP never seems to have what the customer needs. They come close however customization always happens. So you enable a project, use what you can, create what you don't have and hope and pray that neither the OS nor SAP changes anything that requires a change. Enterprise level business plans in multi-year chunks and rapid changes are not in the picture.
This is what makes for most clients I have dealt with, a Windows win over OS X. Backward compatibility. Hardware flexibility. This is not something I am currently seeing nor think Apple is really looking at.
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My company uses SAP.

As an engineer I have to report the hours I am working in projects in SAP, and I must say, I hate it. It's by far the worst piece of software that I have to deal with (horrible UI, extremelly unintuitive, slow, it doesn't adjust the contents of the windows and tables to the size of the window neither automatically nor at will, so I can't take advantage of my 30" display and see a a full week at once, or be able to select the Projects I am working on on the 20+ item list which only shows 4 or 5 at a time!... worst user experience ever has seen the light)

I know it's the ultimate tool for Beancounters. It's 0 and 1 p0rn0graphy for them.

Someone at Apple must be really excited about this news.

All you mentioned can be done. Just need decent dev's and process consultants. However to your point, it is custom work and costs extra.
Other platforms at the enterprise scale fall into the same arena. They talk a great game (usually) but require significant work to make it intuitively usable.

 

[MagMan1979]

Hey Mr. Newbie - those turned off by Cook and his underperforming team have made a number of excellent points. Your lack of understanding, or life / investor experience, or your affection towards Timmy do not make those who post otherwise a troll.

Perhaps you could educate us and even add some insight as to the dismal performance of AAPL for most of Cook's 5 years as CEO.

How has the partnership with IBM propelled the stock since it was announced almost two years ago? SAP is not the issue - Apple appears to be throwing stuff against the wall, but not much is sticking.

And yet all you can provide is a personal attack directed towards me? How interesting...

BTW, under Cook, the stock has never been higher... It was never this high under SJ, so someone has a very short, or selective memory.

Oh, and your sig sure is free of bias against TC:

Tim Cook - the Steve Ballmer of Apple

Tim Cook - the Marissa Mayer of Apple

 

[appledefenceforce]

Magical / "Revolutionize" and AAPL drops further - now under $93/share. Cook is looking like he is running on empty - his BS is not flying with anyone other than Cook Kool Aid drinkers.

Yep and still delivered $10B profit. The truth is it is nowadays trendy to trash Apple and undermine Tim Cook, even though he's the most successful CEO that Apple has ever had and other competitors have delivered much much less profit than Apple (even in their 'better' quarters).

But no, let's have irrationality take over.
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Maybe for the smaller scale use of SAP or Mac centric shops.
For most enterprise level, MS is the platform driver and SAP is set to run on it. I don't see doing two sets of development: one for MS and one for iOS.
Maybe Hanna or older style BW or other reporting? To me this looks like a headline with not a lot of significant future use.

1 phrase: BYOD.

 

[Rtyrell]

Apple today announced a new partnership with SAP to "revolutionize" the mobile work experience for its enterprise customers by combining native iPhone and iPad apps with the SAP HANA Cloud Platform. Under the partnership, Apple and SAP will create a new software development kit and training academy to help developers and enterprise customers create tailored business-focused iOS apps.

The new SAP HANA Cloud Platform SDK will be developed exclusively for iOS and will give enterprise customers simple tools for "quickly and efficiently" building apps for iPhone and iPad based on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform. According to the press release, the native apps will provide access to core data and business processes on SAP HANA while also taking advantage of Apple hardware features like Touch ID, Location Services, and Notifications.

Under the partnership, a new SAP Fiori iOS design language will be created, and SAP will also develop a suite of native iOS apps for "critical business operations" built on Apple's Swift programming language.

Article Link: Apple and SAP Announce New Enterprise Partnership

The iOS-SAP "native" sdk has been out for month available for download from SAP's dev partner download site.

Basically an http wrapper for wsdl type calls - hardly groundbreaking stuff. Plus, notice it only works on HANA - less that 5% of deployed use cases.

This is not a slam, just a caveat.

There remains no true native ios to sap connector such as the .net / java variety. One that can make true RFC function calls to a vast majority of deployed systems.
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The iOS-SAP "native" sdk has been out for month available for download from SAP's dev partner download site.

Basically an http wrapper for wsdl type calls - hardly groundbreaking stuff. Plus, notice it only works on HANA - less that 5% of deployed use cases.

This is not a slam, just a caveat.

There remains no true native ios to sap connector such as the .net / java variety. One that can make true RFC function calls to a vast majority of deployed systems.

I should say MONTHS (plural)

 

[lennyeiger]

I am a database professional. I've been delivering mac-based solutions for 30 years. SAP has a horrible reputation for delivering the worst interface possible. Nearly everyone who uses it hates it. The last person I spoke harangued me for an hour about how bad it was. There are many excellent low end and mid range databases that Apple has been ignoring for years. In one sense its encouraging. In another its working together with the worst of the worst.

 

[AFEPPL]

You lost me at database solutions for the mac....

SAP is world leading in pretty much every way, and it all depends on what version the user has been using in terms of the UI. SAP have been able to be delivered via portal services for well over 10 years, you have lumira which is years ahead of anything else on the market in terms of UI and abilities too... As a tool, its certainly not lacking!

For those that want to see what's with Lumira available rather listen to those that... well, rather that listen to others.

 

[lennyeiger]

I could easily do a screen demo as well. I don't want to diss anyone, however, charting isn't impressive to me. I watched the video, it doesn't look 10 years ahead of anything. There is a lot going on in the database world.

 

[AFEPPL]

Its not my demo, even though the demo they are doing is lame, it shows the UI which is clearly not "worst interface possible" Lumira is not a DB, it's just a UI, HANA is the DB and it's years ahead of Oracle and DB2.

 

[lennyeiger]

My databases run small departments inside of large organizations vs running the whole company. I do plenty of ERP, and everything else. I don't run the stock exchange. From my perspective, DB2 is a dinosaur from the dark ages. So is Oracle. It's unfortunate that Apple didn't support the sql engines that were developed for it, back in the 2001 era, FrontBase and OpenBase. Very large lack of vision on Mr. Jobs' part, unless you think that toasters (consumer products) are the only thing worth anything.... I think OpenBase still exists, we have Servoy, Helix, and a few others. Some have more capacity than others. You and I work in very different worlds. I can't imagine using Oracle for anything... I'm sorry.