If you were not able to attend the webinar this past week on Mobile Trends Through 2014 with Bzur Haun and myself don’t worry – it was recorded for your convenience! We had a great time, turn-out, and content. We even through in a crazy prediction or two.
Watch it here and let me know what you think!
Filed under Future, Mobile, Mobile-Only, Productivity, Strategy
The Verge this past week released a story that disclosed details of the upcoming 2013 release of Microsoft Office. These details leave lots to ponder around the upcoming debut of the dominant office productivity suite on iOS and android. Read this weeks’ Mobile-Only post, Mobile Productivity – A Room With (Just) a View, and see if Office will meet all of you mobile needs.
Benjamin Robbins is a Principal at Palador, a consulting firm that focuses on providing strategic guidance to enterprises in the areas of mobile strategy, policy, apps, and data. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.
Filed under Ecosystem, Mobile, Mobile-Only, Productivity
SAP today had a couple exciting announcements around the Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Unwired mobile app. The first announcement is that the EPM Unwired mobile app is now available on iTunes. The EPM Unwired mobile app currently consists of three apps:
Capital Project Planning
Real-Time P & L
Expense Insight
The apps are on demand, run on Hana, and are in the cloud. Customers who currently own any of the EPM Unwired apps can download the mobile app wrapper and will have the rights to access their data via the mobile device immediately.
The announcement today also included that SAP will add Planning and Consolidation 10.0 as the next app that will become available in the EPM Unwired app. Planning and Consolidation will be available in the December 2012 timeframe.
Below is the full press release.
SAP to Up Ante in Mobile Analytics With Planning and Consolidation App
SAP to Continue to Deliver on Mobile Analytics Road Map With SAP® Business Planning and Consolidation Application on SAP® EPM Unwired Mobile App.
LAS VEGAS —Oct. 16, 2012 — SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced upcoming availability of SAP® Business Planning and Consolidation 10.0 application on the SAP® EPM Unwired mobile app. SAP Business Planning and Consolidation is one of the latest planned additions to the library of apps available on SAP EPM Unwired. The application aims to provide access to decision-critical information through next-generation user experiences on mobile devices. The availability of financial planning and analysis data enables managers to go beyond simply accessing information to inputting information. This offering is part of a series of mobile innovations announced over the last year in business intelligence (BI), cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM), governance, risk and compliance (GRC) and applied analytics. The announcement was made at SAP® TechEd 2012, being held October 16-19 in Las Vegas.
SAP EPM Unwired, available now on iTunes, is the mobile entry point into the SAP® EPM OnDemand solution. Applications like SAP EPM Unwired provide users a mobile front-end as part of the EPM suite on the device of their choice. This gives users the ability to plan, budget, forecast and consolidate anywhere, on demand.
On-the Go Information from the Nordics to Nepal Network access and telecommunication services provider TeliaSonera is using SAP BusinessObjects Mobile to help executives, sales teams and line-of-business managers keep track of their sales pipeline.
“TeliaSonera is committed to mobilizing our workforce in the same way we help mobilize our customers,” said Tito Toivola, head of Large Enterprises and Public Sector, TeliaSonera. “We want our employees to have the same experience at work as they have in their personal lives. This means we have to give our employees access to the tools needed to do their jobs on mobile devices. With mobile analytics from SAP, people across our lines of business can make more informed decisions in real time.”
Helping Users Keep a Finger on the Pulse of Their Business SAP intends to continue momentum and product innovations with planned quarterly releases of mobile analytic apps. Some examples of innovations to mobile analytics announced over the last 12 months include:
SAP BusinessObjects Mobile: The mobile entry point for BI content, including SAP® Crystal Reports® and SAP® BusinessObjects ™ Web Intelligence® software. Users can easily understand business impact, collaborate with stakeholders and take action directly from the software. The most recent 4.3 release has extended visualization capabilities and language support for French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Polish.
SAP BusinessObjects Explorer® mobile app: “Big data” can be searched and explored through dynamic exploration views that feature Google maps integration, augmented reality and the ability to personalize visualizations.
SAP® TechEd 2012 in Las Vegas, Madrid, Bangalore, and Shanghai
SAP customers, partners, and technical experts are expected to convene at SAP® TechEd 2012, the company’s premier technical conference. Hands-on workshops, demo-driven lectures, and Q&A sessions on the latest developments in analytics, mobile, cloud, database, and in-memory computing enable SAP TechEd attendees to enhance their skills while making valuable connections with peers and IT experts from the SAP community. SAP TechEd is being held in Las Vegas, Nevada, from October 15-19, and will be held in Madrid, Spain, from November 13-16; Bangalore, India, from November 28-30; and Shanghai, China, from December 4-5. Follow SAP TechEd on Twitter at @SAPTechEd and join the conversation at #SAPTechEd.
About SAP As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 195,000 customers (includes customers from the acquisition of SuccessFactors) to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit http://www.sap.com.
Filed under Mobile, Productivity
Imagine a mobile conference that was dominated by people working on PCs? What does that say about mobility? About us? This week’s mobile-only post takes a hard look at how we say one thing but do another when it comes to mobility. Check out The Myth of the Mobile Worker on The Enterprise Mobility Forum and let me know if you agree.
Benjamin Robbins is a Principal at Palador, a consulting firm that focuses on providing strategic guidance to enterprises in the areas of mobile strategy, policy, apps, and data. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.
Filed under Mobile, Mobile-Only, Productivity
Mobile apps and operating systems have come a tremendous way in the last several years. However, we are still a ways off from a consistent and seamless ecosystem as we move from device to device and app to app. For my mobile-only post for this week I discuss the challenges I face when moving large files between Android and iOS and how we need to arrive at an ecosystem where getting the task done shouldn’t be hindered by OS or apps. Check out The Square Peg Round Hole Mobile Ecosystem here on the Enterprise Mobility Forum.
Benjamin Robbins is a Principal at Palador, a consulting firm that focuses on providing strategic guidance to enterprises in the areas of mobile strategy, policy, apps, and data. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.
Filed under Apps, Ecosystem, Mobile, Mobile-Only, Productivity
If you had to recover your entire mobile device environment, do you know what you’d need to backup? After a few run ins with a wiped device I’ve decided to catalog all that I’d need to capture. Check out this week’s mobile-only post The Sears and Roebuck Catalog of Mobile Configuration on The Enterprise Mobility Forum.
Benjamin Robbins is a Principal at Palador, a consulting firm that focuses on providing strategic guidance to enterprises in the areas of mobile strategy, policy, apps, and data. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.
Filed under Mobile, Mobile-Only, Mobile-Only, Productivity
I had the privilege today of hosting a webinar on Right Time Experiences – The Future of Big Data, Analytics, and Mobile with Maribel Lopez. If you missed the webinar you can watch the recorded version here. You can also download the pdf version of the deck.
If you missed Maribel’s original post on Right Time Experiences on Forbes.com you can read it here.
Benjamin Robbins is a Principal at Palador, a consulting firm that focuses on providing strategic guidance to enterprises in the areas of mobile strategy, policy, apps, and data. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.
In my year-long experiment with working mobile-only, I have, on many occasions, run into the challenge of needing to join a conference call. While one wouldn’t normally label joining a conference call as challenging, doing so solely from the phone can prove tedious. The difficulty is that the information and pin code for the conference call is either in a meeting invite or an email, while dialing the phone usually occurs in a separate app. I usually have two unsatisfactory options. I can repeat the conference number and pin code to myself over and over like a half – crazed person in an attempt to commit it to short term memory. Alternatively, I can write down the information on a piece of paper beforehand. Fail and fail again – so much for simplicity. That is, until I connected with MobileDay Co-Founder Brad Dupee.
“The whole premise of MobileDay is the notion that it’s very convenient to be on a mobile phone, it’s not necessarily easy,” said Dupee. MobileDay is piecing together the little steps that make a huge difference in the interoperability of apps and services. MobileDay’s initial product offering is a business app that provides one-touch access to any conference call on any service provider from an iPhone or Android smartphone. MobileDay will dial your conference call, PIN and all, with a single touch. “We are tackling one particular problem to launch the company with, which is, one-touch joining of any conference call whether you are a host or a guest of the call,” Dupee said.
There are also a couple additional one-touch features around conference calls and meetings that MobileDay has identified and implemented. The first is one-touch meeting status updates. This feature allows you to quickly update all meeting attendees of your status. For example, if you are running late, one-click will update everyone via email or text. “Rather than searching for you or memorizing your email address, I can just quickly send you an update. I already have your contact information relative to the event right there,” Dupee explained. MobileDay also has a one-touch feature to pull up address in a map app. Best of all MobileDay and its conference solution is free.
While there is some overlap between MobileDay and existing native functionality, Mobile Day provides the ability to do this directly in one-touch from an alert that is displayed 30 seconds before a call. As Dupee explained, “To us, that is our primary feature, when you have a call and you have to get on. Oftentimes it is at that 30 second mark. People realize they have to wrap up one meeting and join the call. And even though you have had a reminder, it is that critical time period right before the call that you realize you don’t have the conference id. Then you have to go hunting for it. It is painful.”
MobileDay has created an experience that is advantageous to all involved in the conference call. “There are independent conference providers that have their app where it works if you are the host of the meeting. But you are out of luck if you are a guest of the meeting,” Dupee stated. “There is an average of 4.5 people per conference call, if only the host can use an app, then there are 3.5 other people who aren’t getting the benefit of the app. With MobileDay it doesn’t matter what you use, it doesn’t matter the service provider, and it doesn’t matter if you are the host or guest. If you are the host you set up your profile information one time in the app. If you want to host a meeting, you can either schedule it from MobileDay or form your regular calendar and it will show up, putting the same details you would normally put in there into the meeting. We can recognize when you are the host based on your identifiers,” he explained.
MobileDay, founded last year in Boulder Colorado, has been in soft launch since that time. However, Mobile Day is kicking things into high gear this week with the official launch of the company. MobileDay is also a finalist in the MobileBeat 2012 Innovation Competition put on by VentureBeat. MobileDay is backed financially by some pretty hefty financial partners such as Google Ventures, Foundry Group, SoftBank Capital, DH Capital, and others.
One-touch features around conference calling are just the beginning for MobileDay. If there is one thing that was abundantly clear in my discussions with Dupee is that MobileDay gets the concept of interoperability and the mobile ecosystem. The amount of effort that went into building the current app, which functions across many different platforms, carriers, and OS variations is a testament to MobileDay’s commitment to building an ecosystem. Dupee and the team at MobileDay are looking at several other services, both mobile and cloud-based, where business users would greatly benefit from one-touch integration. Dupee envisions MobileDay tying together other mission critical business functions with the same seamless simplicity. If the convenience, interoperability, and simplicity that MobileDay offers with one-touch conferencing is any indication of things to come, expect to see many exciting announcements from MobileDay in the near future.
One-Touch into any conference call with MobileDay™. No matter where you are or what you’re doing, eliminate the hassle of dialing, remembering codes, and writing down conference details.
Benjamin Robbins is a Principal at Palador, a consulting firm that focuses on providing strategic guidance to enterprises in the areas of mobile strategy, policy, apps, and data. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.
Filed under Apps, Ecosystem, Mobile, Productivity
There was some light-hearted discussion yesterday on twitter surrounding Brian Katz’s open solicitation for suggestions of mobile ‘crapplications’. For the un-initiated, crapplication is a term to describe the effect scope-creep has upon an application lifecycle. Right about the time when you can start applying the 80/20 rule to an application, it has become a crapplication. Katz wrote a great article on it last fall that you should check out if you haven’t already.
As Katz writes, “a crapplication is really just a term for a bloated desktop application…an application that is bloated with many useless features for the majority of users.” He continues to say, that a crapplication “makes it difficult to figure out how to manipulate your data,” by which he means a bad user interface and user experience.
To build upon Katz’s idea of a crapplication, as well as what’s dogging me at the moment in my mobile-only quest, isn’t so much bloat and bad UI (though there is some of that), it is the lack of functionality in many of the apps I use. From my experience, the current state of mobility isn’t in a state of bloat, but one of anemic proportions. Many mobile apps need some good old-fashion functional protein to put a little meat on their bones. The skeleton is there, but some of the basic features are just missing. I’m not seeing a lot of crap, but rather a lot of lack. These functional weaklings could be considered ‘Lacklications’.
For example, office productivity apps lack word count, track changes, and a table of contents. Blogging apps are missing features such as scheduling, comments, and preview. I have to use the web front end to accomplish this. The native version of apps such as Lync and OneNote are missing painfully basic features. The native Android email client doesn’t let me access notes or tasks in exchange. I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
Some of the cause for emaciation is due to market /platform/apps maturity. Some of it is due to the screen real-estate of the device itself – the small size limits and dictates some functionality. Some of it is due to the fact that certain functions are just not possible in a mobile context. Whatever the reason, it is painfully obvious that you can see the rib-cage of many mobile apps.
But here is the good news. Mobile is new! Mobile is exciting! Mobile is acting as one big, fat reset button not only for many enterprises, but app vendors as well. As I have written about recently, they are using mobility as the excuse to re-examine how ‘we’ve always done things’. They are looking at how we can perform functions and processes in a more efficient manner. Hopefully this means there is opportunity for loads of excess functional fat to be left on the chopping block. This will also hopefully translate into clients working with app vendors to assure that the right pieces of functionality are being developed.
Who knows, perhaps one-day in the near future, I’ll be cursing my bloated mobile ‘crapplications’ with specialized functionality intended for just a select few and a bad UI to boot. Hopefully, the mobile context will guide and spur just the right level of development. The question for the future of mobile apps is – are they going to exercise and eat a healthy diet to build functional muscle or are they going right back to the same fatty diet? Typical human behavior says bad habits are hard to break – but what do you think?
Benjamin Robbins is a Principal at Palador, a consulting firm that focuses on providing strategic guidance to enterprises in the areas of mobile strategy, policy, apps, and data. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.
Filed under Apps, Mobile, Productivity
Today, Google announced the acquisition of Quickoffice. For those who don’t know, Quickoffice is arguably one of the better office productivity suites currently available for mobile platforms (also check out OfficeSuite 6 by MobiSystems). Quickoffice allows users to view, create, and edit Microsoft Office compatible Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. Quickoffice is available cross-platform on Android, iOS, and Symbian.
In the void created by the absence of a mobile version of Microsoft Office, Quickoffice has taken a strong leadership position. However, until yesterday this was done so (not to detract from the product) by an upstart company that could be competitively explained away; my how the stakes have changed. With the acquisition, it has moved from an interesting gap filling measure to a strategic threat from a competitor who doesn’t lack in cash, competition, or cause. Make no bones about it; Google has its competitive sights on Microsoft Office via the mobile platform. (They also bought DocVerse a few months back ) If there wasn’t already immense pressure in Redmond to get a cross-platform mobile version of their popular Office suite out, it just doubled.
First, from a competition perspective, all mobile enterprise office productivity discussions will be framed through the lens of a Google/Microsoft battle. The temptation to turn this into a clash of the titans is just too great for tech writers to avoid doing so. Second, the functionality Microsoft offers will have to be, at a minimum, at least what Quickoffice offers. Based on Microsoft’s ability to deliver mobile capabilities of other Microsoft products I have some real reservations. OneNote for Android is barebones, as is the Lync client. Microsoft doesn’t yet have the track record to deliver fantasist mobile apps outside of the Windows Phone platform. Microsoft seems to be perpetually behind on the mobile front.
However, the biggest challenge Microsoft faces isn’t Google, but rather the consumer. Consumers have come to expect in the mobile arena that they call the shots. I would even go so far as to say they feel entitled to call the shots (not that it is always a good thing). This is expressed in the enterprise as the Consumerization of IT. The Consumerization of IT denotes the idea that technology shouldn’t be overly complex. It should be something that the average consumer can understand. When you combine the sense of entitlement with the Consumerization of IT, the end result is often manifested with end users doing an end-run around the IT department to use the apps and devices they like best. My good friend, Philippe Winthrop, Managing Director of the Enterprise Mobility Foundation, calls it the IT-ization of the Consumer. This attitude, coupled with a product from a viable competitor, should set off major alarm bells in Redmond.
Microsoft is in danger of having consumers do an end-run around Office – call it the Consumerization of Office. With a solid enterprise office suite alternative (provided Quickoffice can deliver the Track Changes functionality) Microsoft will quickly lose one of their greatest strongholds in the enterprise. Without a similar product offering by Microsoft, the acquisition of Quickoffice by Google only hastens this loosening of the grip of Microsoft Office dominance in the enterprise. While Microsoft continues to develop their offering on the sidelines, Google has a staggering advantage to secure market share.
Mobile consumers have demonstrated time and again they will abandon the dominant paradigm en masse in favor of functionally that is available now rather than wait for the old guard to catch up. Users want/need/must perform office productivity tasks on their mobile devices and they are finding workarounds wherever they can. The greater the proliferation of mobile devices in the enterprise, the more of a requirement it will be to consume office documents from those devices. Savvy consumers are not going to sit around and wait for Microsoft to provide the solution when an alternative is in front of them. The question that remains is – How will Microsoft respond and will it be substantial enough and in-time to satiate the empowered consumer?
Benjamin Robbins is a Principal at Palador, a consulting firm that focuses on providing strategic guidance to enterprises in the areas of mobile strategy, policy, apps, and data. You can follow him on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.
Filed under Apps, Mobile, Productivity
