BYOD: Convergence of personal mobile devices and enterprise mobility – An opportunity, like never before !

A Change presents opportunity

The internet era revolutionized the world, the way we communicated and exchanged information. Exactly as the internet era, we are now witnessing another wave of disruptive technology, where mobile technologies are radically changing the way we communicate, exchange and share information, challenging every traditional method of business.

The new reality of changing business needs are more vibrant, with reducing wide gap of customers and suppliers, as the internet and mobile networks makes global-reach easier. Mobile is pushing all boundaries of connectivity and creating an on-demand, inter-connected world where companies, consumers, customers, suppliers and employees can always stay connected, irrespective of their location. The mobile revolution began in the consumer world and has dramatically improved our day-to-day productivity. Booking airline tickets, shopping online, checking flight status, depositing a check, GPS and so much more are simple examples of how mobile transforms our day-to-day life.

Source: Sentechnologies

Ubiquitous access to information and our ability to live an efficient personal life is pushing all boundaries for enterprises to embrace this change. The mobile push is no longer a choice for an enterprise, it has become an imperative to drive overall operational excellence and dramatically improve productivity to do more with less. Forward looking enterprises are balancing the security risks to benefits and empowering personal devices with corporate data access, leading to the BYOD or Bring Your Own Device phenomenon. The potential benefits scale of a BYOD phenomenon is huge, but a BYOD program comes with several security and privacy invasion challenges and it is important to think beyond traditional ways of managing a corporate device and look into what matters the most – Your enterprise mobile apps. Once your enterprise addresses the security and privacy invasion challenges and finds ways to protect only your corporate mobile apps, the BYOD challenge can be turned into profitable opportunities, by converging business processes with enterprise mobility instantly, to set new trends. Leveraging the BYOD phenomenon, enterprises can create an inter-connected business eco-system, where employees, partners and customers connect and dynamically engage for fulfilling business objectives, reaching enterprise goals in record time.

Mobility via BYOD, helps making business smarter, more productive and faster

BYOD enabled enterprise mobility keeps business on the move, by putting real-time contextual information at customers, suppliers and employees fingertips and providing predictive recommendations and insights to improve decision making. Through a BYOD framework, enterprises can cost effectively amplifies organizational expertize by giving people access to collaboration opportunities when and where they need them.  It helps employees to make better use of time and assets to drive quicker results. Mobility helps managing business from anywhere, anytime and by making critical business data, complex analytics and reports available to improve speed of data processing and decision making. According to the Gartner’s report, by 2016, the entire global workforce are predicted to be connected to enterprises through mobile for a major or a minor accomplishment of their tasks

Focus and protect your apps, not devices, to enable BYOD

A cloud based mobile application management helps your enterprise quickly enable BYOD without compromising on security or privacy invasion challenges. Innovapptive’s mPower™ App Store enables enterprises to not only create a private enterprise branded app store to drive targeted distribution and drive higher adoption, but also provide easy and configurable security app wrapper SDK’s that allows enterprises to roll out a variety of app-level security policies. For more information, please visit our mobile application management (MAM) page by clicking here or you can watch the below videos to get a good overview of Innovapptive’s mobile application management (MAM) solution.

SAP Mobile Sales: Up-sell, Retain Existing Customers and Increase Sales Revenues by Over 15-25%

Strategizing how to optimize your sales force and up-sell?

Business organizations are constantly strategizing how, when, and where they can interact with their existing and new sales opportunities for their geographically dispersed sales teams. The competitive markets and changing buyer trends are initiating new business challenges to sustain and excel. The customer and sales force geographic dispersion is growing,traditional sales teams are over-burdened with the task of efficiently managing relationships.  The situation demands techniques and technology which can turn traditional business processes agile to result in  a productive sales force.

Mobile technology can turn traditional sales business processes agile

With the consumer apps, social media and games, mobile now is the technology in motion. It has changed how people transact and interact. The impact can be felt with the surging prominence of BYOD (bring your own device) and consumerization of IT. Surprising  that an average mobile user checks his mobile 150 times a day!! Does this mean anything to with businesses?   Yes, it means a mobile solution  can help businesses to sell more.

So how does an enterprise leverage the mobile revolution to impact their sales and marketing team?

Enterprises going Mobile can provide a flexible approach to maximize sales efforts and increase the accuracy of sales forecasting and revenue projecting.

From a marketing view of point, using multimedia is much easier and effective with a mobile device, for showcasing products and services than using a PDF brochure. Enabling access to required databases from any time, anywhere helps marketing teams have real-time campaign analytics at their fingertips. Marketing managers can make smarter decisions more effectively helping in better return on investment(ROI).

According to a study by Microstrategy, 50% of the sales executives stated that failure of organizations keeping product knowledge current was a major setback for the sales teams.One out every two sales personal stating the limited access to the key sales information is a challenge.  Moving to mobile strategy is a way to go for any company, but among the range of  mobile solutions available, how does an enterprise  decide upon which apps help sales and marketing strategies leverage mobility ?

SAP Mobile Sales Execution Solution

Innovapptive’s offers comprehensive SAP Mobile solutions for sales

Innovapptive’s sales mobile apps are already mobilizingsome of the world’s largest customers and their sales forces  to empower them through the entire sales life-cycle. Innovapptive’s mobile solutions are integrated with both SAP ERP and SAP CRM, and provides your sales executives with ability to “instantly” provide customer quotes, enter sales orders, review customer payment history, review customer sales history, analyze any potential credit risks and process payments by  automatically linking them to the backend SAP ERP or SAP CRM system giving real-time information directly from the field, while replacing paper forms, back office redundant processing and reducing the need for a multi-step order processing. Sales mobile solutions from Innovapptive help the sales team with all the information that they need to close a sales deal at a customer site any time and anywhere.

Mobile Sales Execution – Customer Accounts

• Innovapptive’s SAP Mobile CRM Sales Execution Solution from Innovapptive increases efficiency of field sales execution. The native mobile application enhances productivity of the sales rep, by providing critical insights into sales  execution and increases revenue of customer location visits. By providing anywhere, anytime access to relevant information and functions from mobile devices, enterprises can ensure that the field sales reps are executing company’s brand and product strategies, tactics and objectives in a consistent and reliable way.

• Innovapptive’s SAP Mobile Sales Manager Solution is an SAP® certified solution, an ultimate Mobile Sales solution that empowers sales managers. Using Innovapptive’s mobile sales managers solution, your sales force can have  a 360° visibility to their opportunities pipeline, historical data such as sales history, customer buying habits and customer fact sheets to result in higher deal closure and increased revenue.  Sales personnel can seamlessly craft a compelling sales story about how  the products and services can resolve customers’ critical business challenges, aligned with customer objectives and organizational dynamics. The app helps to deliver a differentiated sales experience and increase overall profitability for the company.

Mobile Sales Execution – Customer Invoices

SAP Mobile Apps: Build or Buy your next Mobile App?

Should I build or buy my next mobile app? It’s the classic buy-vs-build dilemma. Do I buy a product to allow me to get to market quicker, or do I hire software developers to build the perfect, custom solution? We take a look at both options and try to arrive at a logical conclusion.

Enterprises are at the cusp of realizing the immense potential of mobility, leading to the dramatic increase in transforming business processes through mobilization. The promise of operational excellence and achieving better ROI has increased the quest for instant mobilization. Good Technology’s latest Mobility Index report shows that 70 per cent of enterprises think that providing mobile support to their employees over the next 12 months is of high or critical priority. Perhaps the most fundamental decision to make in planning any mobile deployment is whether to build or buy the mobile applications that your workforce will be using in the field.

The perceived benefit of building your own application is that it will have all the features needed for your business and you will not be paying another provider for the use of their professional staff and putting a profit into another company. On the other hand, keep in mind that companies with extensive experience in mobile app development can foresee pitfalls and offer complete solutions in a way that no in-house deployment ever could — simply because the experienced provider has seen numerous companies, experienced issues you probably have not even considered and has staff whose only responsibility is developing mobility software.

In terms of the enterprise mobile solutions market, the choice between web-based / HTML5 applications, native applications, and hybrid applications also plays into the mix. You need to think about which mobile platforms you want to support and what tasks you want your mobile end-users to be able to perform on their mobile devices.

Native applications will provide the best user experience and most robust functionality because your software program will have access to all of the capabilities of the device and will be able to operate without connectivity to a web server.

Web-based applications make it easier to support a variety of mobile devices, because they run inside a web-browser, which is available on most mobile devices. However, user experience and performance suffer and are highly dependent on connectivity.

Mobile Application Development Challenges

If you are thinking about developing your mobile solutions internally, you need to consider that you will be forced to go through an entire software development process, probably for the first time and likely without the benefit of prior experience. You will have to assess all of your business requirements, perform all of the coding and testing, and determine how to automate paper processes. Three key factors to consider are –

• Time – All major developmental components for your mobile solution will result in a significant increase in the time required to get the solution up and running compared to initial expectations. This significant time period will contribute to reducing your company’s return on your investment. Building a solution in-house is a very complicated and laborious process.
• Personnel – In-house development can also evolve into a significant personnel issue. The initial process of developing and deploying an application that seamlessly integrates to your SAP ERP will require hiring talented and experienced IT resources. Key areas where you will need expertise extend beyong the traditional SAP skill-set and involves collaboration between various teams within your IT organization.
• Support – Once the solution is deployed, it then will only need to be maintained. The upgrade life cycle for mobile apps is drastically different from traditional software. Therefore, you will either end up with significant change management issues and managing the application for the right OS versions. If you have a mobile app that is deployed across multiple form-factors and OS, it only compounds this maintenance challenge.

Delivering innovative apps that your enterprise needs

Innovapptive’s collaboration with SAP has brought to the market a wide range of highly innovative SAP Certified pre-packaged mobile apps while assuring that quality standards are maintained. Innovapptive has worked to standardize technical architecture and to create highly intuitive and customizable app interfaces and functionality. This helps customers instantly consume new user-intuitive apps that can be deployed in a matter of weeks.

As needs change, customizing or changing a pre-packaged mobile app was always thought to be nearly impossible than doing so with an in-house solution. Through Innovapptive’s pre-packaged mobile applications, key functionality can be hidden or activated simply by checking or unchecking individual configuration settings — and those changes will then be implemented automatically across a variety of different devices and mobile operating systems, which would be all but impossible to ensure on a solution built from scratch.

 Pre-packaged solutions can transform your mobile strategy

For a single company to make the same ongoing investments in software development to further optimize mobile solutions and to streamline them would not make financial sense. However, for an established mobility vendor, it does, because they undergo such improvements to improve their product and make it more marketable.

As you consider the basic decision of “build versus buy,” the most important question is this: do you want to transform yourself into a software development organization, or do you want to focus on your key strengths and hand off the software development to a company that is focused just on that?

Key advantages of buying a mobile solution as opposed to building one from scratch include the following

• Leveraging the collective experience of the vendor in the specific domain
• Reducing the time it takes to get the solution up and running
• Reducing the number of employees required to maintain the solution
• Ensuring product support of the solution as technology changes

MDM vs MAM : Distributing SAP Mobile Apps in the Enterprise

Will a Mobile Device Management (MDM) Strategy securely mobilize your Contractors, Suppliers, Customers and 3rd Party? How do you distribute SAP mobile apps to a diverse work environment? A cloud based enterprise app store can help you securely distribute your apps to it’s intended audience.

Today’s organizations are multifaceted, having close correlation between various  stakeholders such as contractors, suppliers, customers and 3^rd party entities. However, the efficiency of any business is gauged on how well it can seamless coordinate between all its stakeholders within the shortest time period and establish an effective communication channel, improving its overall RoI.

However, with organizations having multiple offices and its stakeholders spread across the globe, it becomes virtually difficult to pool all information at one place, while effectively connecting and disbursing information to all their stakeholders within the shortest possible time.  Added to that is the rising operational and infrastructure costs to keep pace with the rapid information flow, without losing control about who is viewing what.

With rapid proliferation of mobile technology, things are falling in place and organizations across the globe are realizing the potential of enterprise mobile computing, which is blazing at a rapid pace. Against this backdrop, mobile device management (MDM) which is a new age platform  is gaining rapid momentum in the industry for the management of mobile devices including smart phones, tablets and laptops. Businesses are taking the advantage of this technology to seamless connect across their various stakeholders, enhancing their operational efficiences, minimizing costs and providing a one stop easily accessible data sources. MDM functionality can cover over-the-air distribution of applications, data and configuration setting for all types of devices including smart phones, tablet computer and mobile POS devices.

However, one issue that is bugging the organizations is the accessibility of corporate data, losing great deal of control over who can actually view and use the data. MDM solution is designed to address such concerns by providing a mechanism, wherein it restricts unauthorized access to enterprise applications and/or corporate data. Some of these features include password protection, encryption and remote wipe technology that allows an administrator to delete all data from a stolen device. Other notable feature is the centralization and enforcement of security policies, ensuring greater security compliance without any added efforts.  Hence, the ultimate goal of MDM is to optimize the functionality and security of a mobile communications network, while reducing costs and drastically cutting down downtime.

One step ahead in this direction is the bring your own device (BYOD) model that is slowly gaining momentum across organizations, globally. It literally refers to the policy of allowing employees to bring their own personal mobile devices to their work place and access privileged company information and applications, using these devices. Some of the benefits this model brings forth  is  boosting of employee productivity and morale, while providing the ease and convenience of accessing the corporate data from the comfort of their phones.

Having dwelt with MDM and BYOD, let’s move on to the next level of mobile technology – mobile application management (MAM), which focuses on application management and ensures a lower degree of control over the device, but a much greater level of control over corporate applications.

Some of the features of an end-to-end MAM solution include the ability to:

• Control App provisioning through an enterprise app store
• Update and remove mobile applications via enterprise app store
• Monitor the overall application performance
• Wipe data remotely from managed applications

The above features clearly depicts the value that MAM solutions bring in to the business, specifically from the security perspective, apart from providing other core features including App version management, App configuration management and push services.

Innovapptive offers two out of box MAM solutions, focused in cutting operational costs and adding value to its clients.

• Enterprise Branded App Store – mPower™ AppStore
• Mobile App Security Management – mPower™ Security

Enterprise Branded App Store – mPower™ AppStore

Innovapptive’s mPower™ App Store is designed to help organizations to manage and distribute apps to its employees, while providing a comprehensive platform to drive adoption quickly and maximize mobile investments.

Mobile App Security Management – mPower™ Security

With enterprise security being a key driver for MAM solutions, Innovaptive’s SAP® Certified mPower™ AppSuite comes pre-packaged with a robust native and wrapper app.security. App wrapping differentiates security from the development process and provides fine-grain usage and security policies within Innovapptive’s mPower™ AppSuite. With this app in place, businesses can be rest assured about their security, even when their devices and apps are accessed by their partners, contractors and customers.

The above discussion finally boils down to the point that MAM solutions are here to stay and have truly revolutionized the way an enterprise works remotely with all its stake holders, without bothering about the nitty-gritty of their  mobile security issues. Innovapptive has rightly captured the market and is on its way to innovate and deliver much more apps in this arena – to transform the way enterprises work and deliver.

Build Offline SAP Mobile Apps using SAP Mobile Platform 3.0 SDK’s

SAP made a tremendous shift within their mobile platform’s technology stack. From SMP 2.3 to SMP 3.0 the entire stack was redesigned, from this MBO approach to a SAP Netweaver Gateway support model based on OData. With the brand new Support Packs SMP 3.0 enables offline OData support which makes offline SAP Mobile apps a breeze.

The SAP Mobile Platform (SMP) OData Client SDK was purely meant for applications transacting online with live back-end data. However, there was an option provided to temporary cache with small chunks of data for the application to continue to work without any hindrance, in case there is a drop in connectivity for a short while. With SMP (SAP Mobile Platform),  the OData Client SDK takes these offline capabilities to the next level, where the same application working online (99% of its running time) can have the flexibility to perform like a seamless offline/online application. The major differentiator here is that the application can make changes to data, when it is not connected, which later get propagated to the back-end with order respected.

Hence for the client SDK to perform like a typical offline enabled library, changes were made not only to incorporate a persistent cache, but also to provide a request queue to store the change requests (HTTP(s), as OData SDK still deals with REST over HTTPs) in that order in which they were incorporated, when the application was not in a state to get connected to the desired server. However, this feature is not supported in SUP versions 2.x.x. One notable feature here is that all the offline capabilities are provided as part of the client SDK itself and no additional efforts are required from the server side. The server continues to behave like the proxy that it had behaved in the previous versions of SUP.

A snapshot of core features of the new SMP 3.0 client SDK to support offline are as follows:

Queuing of Requests

This refers to queuing of change HTTP(s) requests in the request queue from the client side, when the application fails to reach the desired end-point or lacks connectivity. All Fetch requests are run assuming that the application is working online. It works if the back-end server is reachable, else it fails. Automatically detecting changes in connectivity with the desired backend so that the requests are either queued (when switched to offline) or they are fired from the queue (when online).

Caching of Data

The apps are set-up to be working with a persistent or in-memory cache, based on the choice of application developer, defaulted to persistent. The app uses a server copy of the data (which has data exactly as obtained from the server) and a local copy (data manipulated by the client application when offline). The server cache is maintained per URL used to fetch the data as against the local cache which contains data stored according to the Entry ID (OData way identifying a unique instance). Merging of subsequent delta data from the back-end with the already existing initial data in the server cache.

There can be 2 versions of the same data present in the cache, the choice can be made by the application developer to display the latest data (either got from the server or modified on the client based on the timestamp). The cache on the SDK closely resembles the cache of a web browser. Each page is cached as it is and there are chances of duplication – storage of same content across pages. Same concept applies with the Offline Client SDK.

How Innovapptive’s portfolio aligns with SAP 3.0 future roadmap

Innovapptive is one of the leading SAP mobile solutions provider and has gauged and evaluated several past and present SAP mobile trends & technologies and is fully geared to adapt and align to the new road map by way of innovative SAP mobile offerings. Innovapptive leverages the SAP mobile platform 3.0 to design and build it’s entire portfolio of SAP Mobile Apps and leverages the SAP Mobile Platform 3.0′s  latest features and functionality such as the OData Offline SDK capability to build its best-in-class configurable SAP Mobile Applications. Innovapptive leverages this experience to  help clients build customized apps on the SAP Mobile Platform 3.0 – quickly and easily. With its enterprising work force and state-of-the art delivery center, Innovapptive provides cutting edge mobile app development frameworks, using platforms such as SAP Mobile Platform 3.0, which tremendously accelerates custom application development life cycles.