Hot on the heels of the news that more of its portfolio has been certified for Amazon Web Services (see SAP, Sapphire and cloud questions), SAP has moved to offer Afaria mobile device management on Amazon’s cloud.
What is significant about the Sapphire announcement of Afaria on AWS is that it makes mobility that much more accessible because its shifts the headache of device management infrastructure out-of-house and onto the cloud, while making it more financially accessible too. That will appeal to large enterprises, and particularly to the SMB’s SAP hopes to pull into its applications sphere and who are an important group in terms of sustaining growth. And the more mobile users SAP can attract, the more users it has accessing it core business applications, directly or otherwise, ultimately adding to its licence revenue.
More exciting is the news that SAP is also working with telecommunications operators with a view to operators providing bundles that could, for example, include devices, data plans and device management. Over the past year we have been stressing the need for software and telco partnerships. This type of cross technology and industry collaboration, coupled with cloud device management will further accelerate the already fast moving mobile market and help the shift from simply mobilising the workforce to mobilising enterprise applications.
Amdocs, the billing and customer experience software provider to telco service providers, has been poised to take advantage of enterprise application mobility and its link between the software and telco worlds (see Europe is working for Amdocs) but we feel it lacks the breadth of offerings and market influence to lead. SAP is another matter.