Emerging technologies -- mobile applications, cloud computing, and in-memory-based solutions -- are providing new ways for companies to design and implement custom applications on a variety of platforms and frameworks. This column provides an overview of SAP's strategy for supporting these trends and accelerating innovation, and explains how SAP NetWeaver helps you meet your custom development needs in all of these areas of innovation.
Emerging technologies, such as mobile applications, cloud computing, and in-memory-based solutions, provide new ways for companies to think about, design, and implement custom applications on a variety of platforms and frameworks.
With all of these innovations becoming available, it’s no surprise that so many questions at SAP TechEd 2011 focused on custom development tools and infrastructures and how SAP will help customers leverage these new technologies. After all, custom development options allow customers and partners to build extensions to SAP’s solutions that interface with external solutions and include industry-specific components.
In this article, I’ll provide an overview of SAP’s strategy for supporting these trends and accelerating innovation, and explain how SAP NetWeaver helps you meet your custom development needs in all of these areas of innovation.
Paving the Way Toward Mobility
The mobile market is growing rapidly, especially with the popularity of smartphones, tablet computers, and other devices. SAP recognized this trend early and is helping its customers keep pace by paving the way toward the adoption of these emerging technologies with new and enhanced solutions, infrastructure support, and tools that support custom development.
With the acquisition of Sybase, SAP entered the mobile market from an infrastructure perspective. Sybase Unwired Platform is the leading platform for managing mobile devices at an enterprise level. On the client side, SAP builds and delivers new mobile apps, such as SAP Mobile Sales and SAP Mobile Service, which you can download from app stores. These apps enable users to connect to the SAP back end and, via the collaboration tool SAP StreamWork, leverage social network computing. Many SAP mobile solutions have also started to integrate SAP StreamWork to facilitate collaboration in the product life cycle, sales order management, and financials areas.