Enterprise Mobility Hits the Mainstream
Thursday, May 13th, 2010 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor
Which ever way you look at it, the SAP announcement on May 12th detailing a definitive agreement to acquire Sybase is somewhat of a coming of age for Enterprise Mobility.
I don’t pretend to be able to predict what other events this deal will trigger, except that clearly the position in “Enterprise Mobility” that Sybase has carved out for itself in recent years is paying off ($5.8b is hard to ignore) and provides further evidence that enterprise mobility solutions are converging rapidly with more mature are areas of IT, such as application development and security. There are many opinions out there on whether this is a game changing event or more of a headscratcher.
My own personal view is that it is nothing but good news for the Enterprise Mobility industry and in the end will benefit Enterprise Mobility Managers as they struggle to keep up with the pace of innovation, fragmentation and complexity they currently have to deal with.
Tags: enterprise mobility
(I led product strategy at Oracle for wireless and mobile applications and prior to that I was a VP at Sybase.)
Sybase built a $200MM+ business around mobility – that’s rare! For most managers, it is very difficult to justify investment for mobility even at companies like SAP and Oracle. With SAP’s bold (and desparate) move and today’s integration of workstyle and lifestyle, mobility is now “table stakes” for enterprise software and it will become a feature versus a separate smokestack that must be jusified on it’s own. What I loved most was that Sybase built an important application for the B2B enterprise productivity segment versus the B2C convenience segment that gets so much attention these days. To me – that’s a tipping point.
It is great news for the Mobility Industry because it puts a high value on mobility as part of the overall go-to-market value statement for enterprise computing. It is also great news for ISV’s that are working to simplify mobility for IT while providing all of its benefits for user productivity and collaboration – companies like iPass, Antenna Software and Rearden Commerce. SAP admitted that mobility was too hard even for itself and bought specific expertise (along with great database, development tools and integration technology).