Following a number of recent news articles incorrectly reporting that they're set to fade out of the Mobile development platform market, SAP have reinstated their commitment and support to quality enhancements for customers using the SAP Mobile Platform.
In a statement, Senior Product Manager at SAP, Martin Grasshoff said: "Some news articles misconstrued the truth and failed to report that SAP has been and will continue to invest heavily in mobile. I want to reiterate that mobility is very important to SAP. SAP believes that the delivery of mobile apps is ubiquitous and necessary for our customers.; part and parcel to delivering digital experiences that our customers are prioritising."
To help customers take advantage of the latest innovations in mobility, SAP have focused their development efforts on SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services – SAP’s primary solution for mobile app development and delivery for the past few years.
SAP recently partnered with Apple to deliver an iOS SDK that makes it easy to deliver complex, rich, native iOS apps. The organisations also introduced a mobile card creation capability in order to deploy small datasets to mobile devices in a “micro app” form factor, and added a low-code mobile app development feature to foster visual mobile app development.
Marin Grasshoff added: "We have invested significantly in our cloud based Mobile Platform over the past several years. Going forward, our mobile investments will be heavily focused on SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Service. This includes continued innovations in the SDK for iOS, enhancements to the micro app tool, and a priority on the low-code mobile developer kit. This single integrated mobile offering serves customers by providing a solution that integrates with both on-premises and cloud-based data sources, while innovating at the speed of the cloud."
SAP will continue to deliver incremental quality enhancements to customers’ existing on-premises investments in SAP Mobile Platform per SAP terms and conditions. All customers with active maintenance agreements can expect the SAP Mobile Platform to be supported per SAP guidelines.
In addition, customers who are currently running SAP Mobile Platform on premises should consider moving to SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services. As a result, users will be able to take advantage of the following:
1) Lower costs
If you take the operational cost into account, on-premises deployments easily become more expensive compared with cloud solutions as the following effort comes on top:
- Installation (Landscape preparation, automation scripts…)
- DB administration, incl. backup and quarterly backup sanity check, DB upgrade
- Patch installation (including testing )
- Upgrade installation (including regression testing)
- Hardware upgrades
- And more.
If you move to SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services, all these actions are handled by SAP, including SAP Cloud Enterprise Support in data centers around the world.
2) Faster access to innovations
While you will still get improvements on SAP Mobile Platform, SAP's product roadmap is focusing on innovations on SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services. If you want to benefit from these features, you need to get them in the cloud.
3) SAP Cloud Platform family
As part of SAP Cloud Platform, you can leverage the full power of the rich enterprise feature set offered around Mobile Services. Starting from SAP HANA or ASE databases, to runtimes for JAVA, HANA XS, HTML5 and even ABAP you have a full toolbox available to build your digital enterprise. Moving to SAP Cloud Platform for your mobility projects opens a new world of possibilities for your enterprise.
SAP will continue to provide support for SAP Mobile Platform, but are recommending users to consider migrating apps to SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services.
If you’re not already familiar with SAP Cloud Platform mobile services, check out these resources:
- A blog explaining why moving to SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services can help customers embrace mobility across their enterprise.
- An overview of the SAP Cloud Platform Mobile Services offering
- An overview of SAP Cloud Platform
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