It's been nearly four years since SAP got into enterprise mobility with the acquisition of Sybase, but many customers still don't quite understand its mobile product strategy, according to a new survey by the Americas' SAP Users' Group.
Recently-installed BlackBerry CEO John Chen is on a mission to restore the ailing company to financial health, largely by restoring faith in BlackBerry among corporate CIO's and other traditional enterprise customers.
SAP is planning to rely heavily on HTML5 and open standards within its products for building mobile applications, and is embracing the concept of BYOT (bring your own tools) in order to draw interest from developers.
SAP reported on Wednesday a 14 percent increase in revenue in the third quarter ended September 30, and said its business pipeline continues to remain very strong and companies continue to invest in IT. The business software vendor did not however revise its outlook for the full year 2011, citing the ongoing uncertain macroeconomic environment.
Development of enterprise mobile apps has been moving more slowly than development of consumer-facing apps, according to Gartner. One main reason is IT leaders' concerns about the security of mobile devices, which are often employees' personal devices, and are vulnerable to being lost, hacked or stolen. While there are plenty of established tools and practices for keeping Web visitors from straying (or hacking) into sensitive corporate data, managing security across a diverse set of mobile devices remains a challenge, IT experts say.
BlackBerry's appointment Monday of former Sybase CEO John Chen as its next executive board chair and interim CEO could be the best news in months for the struggling smartphone company, analysts said.