by Ken Murphy.

At Reporting & Analytics 2012, keynote speaker Sanjay Poonen, SAP President and Corporate Officer, Global Solutions presented a how-to guide for starting out on a “mobility journey,” where analytics and business intelligence fit in and where SAP stands as far as its vision in helping enterprise tie everything together in an all-encompassing mobility strategy.

Poonen began his keynote, titled “How to Transform Your Enterprise with Mobile, Big Data and Analytic Technologies” with a few mind-blowing nuggets to illustrate both the power of Big Data and the hold of mobility in our day-to-day lives. He said that during his 90-minute address, enough data would be generated around the world to fill the Library of Congress three times over. Of course that may be a little less today with Hurricane Sandy wreaking havoc up and down the East Coast but still –point taken.

The lesson? ‘Nomophobia’ (No-mobile-phobia) is real, and the enterprise apps that Poonen and his team demoed have a good chance to help the condition spread. With on average 40 business apps on a BYOD device, the challenges as Poonen pointed out are many: how do you handle a device platform? How do you ensure you have the skill set to build and deploy the apps? The SAP mobile device portfolio that Poonen laid out is a five-point plan or strategy with SAP Afaria as the management platform that incorporates an unlimited number of B2E and B2C apps, mobile analytics, related services and a Sybase messaging infrastructure.

One of the key benefits of SAP Afaria, Poonen said, is its scalability concerning the number of mobile devices it can support. At Sapphire Madrid, Poonen said, there will be a sneak peek of a simulation running a half billion devices on SAP HANA.  So, if BYOD is the future, what types of apps will a mobile management system support? Poonen and his team demoed a few cool mobile apps, including an HCM application that works almost like a mobile personnel Rolodex , easily tracking and reporting on any number of KPI’s like salary, evaluations and attrition rates. Some B2C apps showcased were state-of-the-art in fashion design, home projects, even a 3D-enabled app used to pinpoint airplane maintenance scenarios. Another app was designed for use by cities where residents could report and follow-up on items such as busted streetlights and potholes. A great use for today would be reporting downed power lines and other hurricane damage.  

Here, Poonen discussed running SAP Afaria using Amazon Web Services to realize benefits such as global scalability, cost certainty, pay-as-you-go and business intelligence integration to take advantage of Afaria reporting capabilities on-demand.

Poonen focused on analytics during the latter part of his keynote, with demos of mobile analytics and SAP EPM Unwired OnDemand and wrapping up with his vision of where mobility and mobile analytics fits in with the Internet of Things (IoT), where it’s expected that 50 million things from alarm clocks to refrigerators will be connected to the Internet by 2020.

Every stage of the “mobility journey” that Poonen discussed shared a common theme:  accomplishing more by doing less, which is why plumbing the depths of what’s possible in a mobile analytic framework makes the journey a worthwhile endeavor.