SAP will set up PDA mobile solutions development centre

With the advent of mobile commerce, CRM solutions are getting extended to include the newly emerged mobile customers. CRM vendors are now releasing mobile CRM solutions developed exclusively for the mobile devices such as laptops, PDAs, WAP phones. SAP Labs India, the R&D arm of SAP AG, is now focussing on this relatively new area. It is credited with the design and development of mobile CRM solution, Basis mySAP.com.

Please tell us more about Basis mySAP.com?

We are one of the biggest business application software and ERP solutions providers and now, we are focussing on the new business opportunities like CRM through our team, Basis mySAP.com, a Business Unit Mobile Technology which is a part of the Global Business Unit of mySAP.com technology development platforms. We cater to the business enterprises to store vital information about the customers and the sales processes and provide them with touch points like call centers, Internet centers and mobile touch points to equip sales force with solutions on their mobile devices like laptops, PDAs and phones. Presently, we have developed solutions for mobile sales and services for laptops and are currently in the process of shipping our first version of the mobile solution to PDAs. We are a role model for internationally distributed development, where although working seamlessly together, the different teams in India and Germany, own certain parts of the entire system. We have partnered with Kiefer Veitinger, one of the biggest CRM solutions provider for Sales Force Automation (SFAs) in Europe and who have a development lab in India.

The main focus of our efforts is in developing a world class, easy to use development environment with extensive configuration management features and in developing generic and extensible application frameworks, which target mobile applications. SAP

Labs India has provided major contributions to the of the mobile CRM technology solution. The Mobile Technology team in Sap Labs India is split into three smaller teams:

a) One that provides application, functionality and sales process of service persons,

b) Another looks after technology framework and

c) The third provides middleware software to server-based application software such as R/3, our ERP solution and our other business intelligence software.

In general, the team looks after our developmental platforms MAS (Mobile Application Studio), BOL (Business Object Layer), Control framework and ARS (Application Repository Services). We have identified clearly three independent components between Germany and India for smooth collaboration. These are

As the market requirements are mainly from Europe and the US, product management and other decisions are formulated in Germany and then discussed with their Indian counterparts over the design, architecture and other development aspects.

We have plans to establish a part of the PDA mobile solutions development centre here in India as we have found out that it is easier to find skilled professionals here and to enter new markets. It will take some time for the decision process and should be out sometime during this March. We plan to provide functionality in the areas of sales and service, which will be especially handy for the consumer good segment.

The Mobile CRM Solutions provide a complete integration and a broader range of overall function. The data exchange with the ERP system and all CRM components like CRM online, TeleSales, Internet Sales, Mobile Sales and the coupling with data providers on the Web and in form of our APO and Business Warehouse solutions guarantee the highest level of reliable and fast data exchange and integration. With the SAP Mobile Application Studio we provide our customers with a powerful and sophisticated set of tools that support easy customizing and enhancements of each and every component of the Mobile application.

SAP delivers a suite of tools that are put together as the SAP Mobile Application Studio which exactly focuses on providing convenient customizing and modification support. Just like the ABAP/4 development workbench in R/3 with a Repository, Data Dictionary, Screen and Menu Painter and ABAP editor, the SAP MAS, based on object-oriented architecture, provides a broad range of integrated tools. These tools pave access to easy customizing and modification of each and every functionality, object and data definition and graphical representation of the mobile Application. In a visual environment we even manage to avoid programming but support easy drag & drop declarations to create or redefine business objects, functions and procedures and the user interface design.

The user only applies the changes and then simply uses the ‘Generate’ functionality, which automatically updates or creates a ready-to-use version of the Mobile Application. This makes customizing and enhancement of the Application almost as easy as child's play thanks to the powerful object-oriented framework and tools. Since we have customers all over the world, this solution also offers multi-lingual support, i.e. supports different languages and different quote pages through translation software.

Being the long-term market leader in the ERP market with the products R/2, R/3 and mySAP.com, SAP's goal is to position the complete suite of integrated business solutions, together with the broad variety and integration of SCM and CRM products, in order to become number one in e-business. A range of industry specific solutions, business intelligence software and especially the set of new technology products for the Mobile SAP solutions for CRM and other products together with our broad customer base helps us to reach that aim. The already high and fast rising interest in SAP's CRM products in combination with mobile and web-enabled solutions looks more than promising to reach that aim.

While the Mobile CRM Solutions like SAP Mobile Sales or Mobile Service are smart client solutions for the use on laptop computers currently, the generic architecture of our framework has already proven to support Web-enabled thin client solutions and applications which can be accessed from PDAs and WAP-enabled mobile phones. SAP's experiences with the mobile mySAP.com Workplace technology and the results of the research in our Labs in India will be available to extend the reach of the mobile solutions to smaller devices like PDAs and WAP cell phones.

A major group of our development teams in Bangalore focuses on providing a new technology for m-commerce use. Providing solutions for miniature devices of course requires special research and development on the optimization of the human-computer interface, such as speech recognition interfaces, which will be part of our evaluation and development. Here, too, we can use our experience made in products like the mobile mySAP.com Workplace or the PDA access to the mySAP.com systems and extend these solutions with new results of our development and research.

How do you address issues like security and up gradations?

Based on our long-term experience in that field we enhanced our high-standard security

concepts that we developed for the R/2, R/3 and mySAP.com generations with additional features which make use of the object-oriented architecture and the PC-specific environment. The powerful support of upgrades has always been a major strength of the SAP solutions: integrated in the SAP Mobile Application Studio Framework we provide a complete set of transport and change management functions. Every change and enhancement to the system in a multi-user distributed work environment is automatically recorded. Versioning and Branching mechanisms guarantee a complete change in history and automatic merge and upgrade support. This not only means that all changes are recorded but also the data of a new release can automatically be merged into the current system, keeping the complete data set and all customer modifications and enhancements. A sophisticated "collision detection" system provides the user with an easy means to deal with conflicts of user's modifications and the newly imported version.