‘Unwiring Your Enterprise with SAP: Mobile Industry Strategy, Trends and Lessons Learned (A Customer Perspective),’ was the name of the webcast co-hosted by the SAP Community Network and the SAP EcoHub teams this morning.

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“Reporters are ‘word people’,” is the excuse given whenever stats are misreported by the media. Well, maybe I’m just > *, but I was a journalist AND captain of my high school math team.

So misreported/misinterpreted surveys and stats bug me. Case in point: CNBC had an otherwise well-reported article last week called ‘The iPad is Tops with Doctors.’ It had some interesting anecdotes from doctors talking up the iPad’s usefulness when on their rounds seeing patients.

“I definitely feel lost when I don’t have this [iPad] on a shift,” the director of emergency medicine at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center told CNBC.

Being able to immediately pull up x-rays and diagrams at patients’ bedside helps doctors relate to their patients, said another Beth Israel doctor.

“The number of times I’ve had patients say to me ‘That’s the first time I’ve understood my disease’ — I mean, it happens all the time to me. To me, that’s validation as a doctor,” he said.

As key evidence supporting this trend piece, the reporter cited two statistics: According to Chilmark Research, 22% of US doctors in the U.S. were using iPads by the end of 2010. With about 820,000 active doctors in the U.S., that would be almost 181,000 doctors toting about an iPad.

That’s impressive, but nothing compared to the second stat, credited to mobile vendor Aptilon: 4 out of 5 U.S. doctors plan to buy an iPad this year.

That stat seemed too good to be true.

And it was: according to the press release for the survey, 79% of doctors said that if asked to choose, they *preferred* an iPad over Windows PC and Android-based tablets (which garnered 12% and 9%, respectively).

Aptilon, to its credit, wasn’t trying to fool anyone. In fact, it says the survey indicates within the next 12 months, about 38% of U.S. doctors will own an iPad. Or four out of 10, or half of what CNBC said.

Despite that statistical error, I wholeheartedly believe that MobiHealth and Health 2.0 are taking off. Check out the excellent MobiHealthNews for evidence.

At Sybase, healthcare is one of the vertical industries that we see embracing our mobility products (the other industry we are targeting now is insurance. The large number of field workers makes mobility attractive to them). Expect Sybase and SAP to announce as early as SAPPHIRE some health-specific business apps that we’ll be delivering ASAP afterward.

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* Means ‘greater than two standard deviations from the mean’, or different from 95% of the referenced population. Or in plain English, a weirdo.

Enterprise app store. The phrase might conjure up a vision of a glossy company-sanctioned portal for downloading updates to Fruit Ninja and your other time-wasting games. Alas, no.

As the ginormous Apple App Store is to Wal-Mart, an enterprise app store will be to your company’s purchasing department – if the department consisted of thousands of personal shoppers.

That’s because enterprise app stores are envisioned as being in-house portals for employees to provision their smartphones and tablets with the apps they need for their particular jobs (and only those apps).

The technology to build enterprise app stores is available today. Sybase’s Afaria software [full disclosure: created by my employer] enables companies to create self-service portals hosting their own apps, as well as links to consumer or third-party apps hosted on external sites such as the Apple App Store or the Google Marketplace (for Android).

So far, enterprises haven’t deployed Afaria’s app store capabilities widely, according to Willie Jow, vice-president for mobility at Sybase.

But Jow expects enterprise app stores to take off very soon for a wide variety of reasons:

1) In the post-BlackBerry world, app stores make the most sense to manage deployments of apps to hundreds or thousands of employees all running different operating systems and devices.

2) App deployments by businesses are taking off. Research conducted by Sybase and Kelton Research earlier this year found that two-thirds of companies plan to roll out 5 or more mobile apps this year. 21% plan to roll out 20 or more.

3) This enterprise app boom is due to two reasons. First, vendors like SAP and Sybase are preparing to roll out a whole fleet of mobile apps this year. These pre-built/pre-packaged apps may still require some customization by the individual enterprise. But they are certainly much faster and less expensive than building a mobile enterprise app from the ground up.

Second, the difficult truth is that the user interfaces for smartphones and even tablets make them less adept than PCs for many tasks. As a result, smart developers need, in Jow’s words, to “chunkify” (divide up) large server applications into smaller apps because “when I’m mobile, I don’t want to go 7 screens deep to do what I need to do. I want to be quick.”

Chunkifying large applications is not only less wasteful, but it lets companies selectively deploy only the right functions to the right employees, says Jow. “Not every employee needs the ability to do approvals, or view analytic dashboards,” he said.

4) Self-service enterprise app stores make sense for a pair of technical reasons. Windows PCs are typically handed out to employees after IT has wiped the hard drive and installed a new “image” with the operating system and required software. You can’t do that with smartphones and tablets brought into the workplace by employees under a Bring Your Own Device policy. Employees not only want to keep their personal data safe, but they will balk at the notion of IT taking their device away for half a day or more, says Jow.

The other reason that self-service app stores make sense is that the connectivity situation with smartphones and tablets. Forcibly pushing out new Windows updates to a desktop or even Wi-Fi-only laptop PC might be ok, but it could cause an iPad connected via 3G to become unusably slow or, worse, result in unexpectedly-large service charges. Thus, the app store’s gentle ‘pull’ model makes more sense than a dictatorial ‘push’ model.

5) Enterprise app stores will start out as portals purely for internal provisioning. But just as corporate intranets evolved into B2B customer-facing extranets, these enterprise app stores will eventually also service corporate partners and vendors, argues Jow.

As for the notion of third-party marketplaces devoted solely to enterprise apps (what readers might have thought I meant by ‘enterprise app store’), Jow isn’t a believer. He expects mobile apps created by independent software vendors to continue to be sold primarily through Apple and a “few other megastores.”

It’s a busy week in enterprise mobility. There’s a new big boy in the US wireless market. CTIA is going full blast in Orlando. And there are other enterprise IT conferences where mobility will be a huge topic of discussion.

All of this surface activity doesn’t necessarily mean that enterprises are embracing mobility. Rather, CIOs and other executives rightly demand harder proof that their peers are moving forward (and that they are at risk of falling behind).

Here’s an infographic we produced at Sybase documenting some of the more compelling proof points of which IT and other executives need to be cognizant.

Pardon the ‘surf the wave’ metaphor. It was coined many weeks before the disaster in Japan. The point hopefully remains valid: these are the apps that today’s modern enterprise is rolling out, and this is what you need to be doing to remain a leader or simply keep pace with your peers.

(Click on the graphic to view a larger version. Then right-click your mouse in order to download a version that you can then pass along to peers.)

For mobile consumers, the $39 billion merger of AT&T and T-Mobile is probably bad. Prices, especially for existing T-Mobile customers, have a good chance of rising, while customer service is likely to fall.

For enterprises, however, this could actually be a good thing.

(Full disclosure: Sybase is an enterprise customer of both AT&T and Verizon Wireless in the United States because of our in-house use of iPhones. However, we only have partnerships with Verizon and its parent company, Vodafone.)

Enterprises are less cost-sensitive than consumers. Quality-of-service is more important, especially for the muckety-mucks and revenue-generating salesfolks who typically travel the most and whose time is super valuable.

The cell tower sites and additional spectrum that AT&T gains by acquiring T-Mobile will give AT&T the opportunity to boost call reliability (fewer dropped calls) and data speeds (more consistent 3G, and, eventually, 4G) and increase its total coverage area. It was in the first and third areas that AT&T had long been losing to Verizon. And with Verizon’s release of 4G prior to Christmas, AT&T fell behind there, too.

More bandwidth is crucial because the federal government has, argue critics, been slow about releasing new spectrum for carriers to acquire. Meanwhile, the building of new cell tower sites continues to come under fire nationwide from NIMBY-minded residents worried about cancer risks (not proven) and property values (also not certain – towers can be camouflaged as trees, for instance).

Second, while T-Mobile vows to remain independent for now, it’s still likely that AT&T and T-Mobile will use their combined economies of scale in order to standardize on similar handsets, since their underlying technology is the same (GSM), points out Dan Hays, a partner with PRTM, an international management consulting firm.

At the very least, this will slow the explosive growth in the number of available handsets on the market.

That will help enterprises swamped today by the wide variety of phones and tablets they are asked by employees to support as part of their Bring Your Own Device policy. Again, don’t expect the handset market to shrink drastically, just not grow as fast as before.

Om Malik argues forcefully that the merger “is just bad for wireless innovation, which means bad news for consumers. T-Mobile has been pretty experimental and innovative: It has experimented with newer technologies such as UMA, built its own handsets and has generally been a more consumer-centric company. AT&T, on the other hand, has the innovation of a lead pencil and has the mentality more suited to a monopoly: a position it wants to regain.”

Om’s right, but his argument just doesn’t apply to big businesses and organizations. They value innovation, for sure, but only up to a limited point in certain areas. More innovation in the form of more devices, more service plans, more technology upgrades, is a hassle.

For sure, no Fortune 1000 wants to be stuck be using obsolete technology. But the cost of ensuring high quality of service in the face of constant change can bankrupt even the most cashed-up IT organization. Think of how many corporate workers are still on a 10-year-old OS like Windows XP (raises hand).

None of this means that enterprises shouldn’t view their mobile strategy as an opportunity for differentiation or innovation. Devices still need to be managed well, and apps can be deployed that help companies perform tasks faster and cheaper. It’s just that enterprises want their carrier to be a stable utility like the water company that only delivers big bang upgrades that enterprises can plan for well in advance, so that they can focus on the internal innovation that really matters to them.

(Updated March 23rd after speaking with Sybase Professional Services) Last week, I wrote about how Minnesota food maker General Mills has deployed iPads running SAP CRM – supported by the Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP) mobile middleware – to 200 of its field salespeople.

It was an interesting stuff, and I wanted to learn more, so I pinged Greg Kull of The Principal Consulting. Kull has been working with General Mills for the past two years (he also used to manage an art-rock band called Echolyn and has written a novel, but I digress). I also spoke with Parag Karkhanis, North American director for mobility at Sybase Professional Services, and Robert Waywell, a practice manager in our Services division whose team did most of the implementation work at General Mills.

Here’s what I learned:

1) One of General Mills’ major goals with the iPad was to encourage reps to input data they gathered in the field right away, rather than wait until the end of the day, or even the end of the week when they were back at the office done traveling. Dilly-dallying was the norm when the reps ran the previous version of the CRM app running on their laptops. Now, with the iPad, reps are entering data right away, accomplishing what General Mills calls “the 3 minute mile.”

2) In addition to SAP CRM 7.0 and SUP 1.5.2, General Mills is running SybaseAP’s CRM for Mobile Sales 1.2 app along with NetWeaver Mobile 7.10. The latter works with SUP’s Data Orchestration Engine to synchronize data. Besides customizing and extending the CRM for Mobile Sales app, Sybase’s Services consultants worked on connecting the SUP side of DOE, according to Waywell, while TPC handled SAP’s DOE.

3) Mobilizing took just about 4 months, from August to December 2010. Actual development took 2 months, testing took another month, and then 1 month to finalize production. Sybase had a half-a-dozen people working on the project, said Karkhanis, though not simultaneously and not anything close to full-time.

4) The sales reps can use either the SAP CRM app or Microsoft Outlook as a front-end. Data such as calendar and contacts is synchronized between the two apps.

5) General Mills chose SUP in part because it plans to roll out iPads to other employees as well as support employee-liable devices, i.e. Bring Your Own.

6) The Principal Consulting has helped roll out SUP to six customers, with another six nearing completion.

7) Besides General Mills, those customers include Cintas (done with the assistance of Sybase Services), Purdue Pharmaceuticals, another drug firm, a large technology products maker, a German automaker and a high-tech manufacturer. Sybase Services, meanwhile, is working on close to ten SUP implementations right now, according to Karkhanis.

8) Enterprise customers are asking Kull when the firm will be able to support Android devices, as well as Google Apps (instead of Microsoft Outlook/Office).

9) TPC is developing a pharmaceutical app for image capture and workflow for sales reps. In plain English, that would allow drug sales reps in a retail store to take a photo of a drug package suspected to be counterfeit and then send it back to their corporate server for immediate analysis.

10) While customers do ask about the value of deploying a full-fledged Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP) such as SUP, Kull says he is able to convince most of them of the merits of choosing a platform over a point solution. “Without one, you’re very limited. You’ll have to continually rebuild your point solution anytime you deploy a new device or function,” he said. (Here’s a whitepaper that goes into more depth about this).

I sometimes forget that market research firms are made up of individuals with their own opinion on things.

That was driven home to me at the Directions 2011 conference in San Jose today.

If I’d just stayed til lunch, I would’ve left with thinking that IDC analysts all believe that the post-PC, mobile era is upon us.

But listening to Tom Mainelli speak this afternoon, I was painted a basically 180 degree-opposite picture.

While Mainelli abides by the IDC forecast that smartphones and tablets will permanently overtake PCs this year (500 million of the former versus 380 million PCs), he insists that PCs aren’t going the way of the Stegosaur.

“We hear about this every few years,” said Tom Mainelli, an analyst at IDC, said in his presentation entitled appropriately ‘The Multi-Device World’. “As a PC guy, it sometimes gets a little frustrating.”

“There’s going to be room for multiple devices,” he said. Moreover, “the PC remains the best deal among all of the devices available today.”

Sure, IDC expects 44 million media tablets (which doesn’t include the small number of tablets running Windows) to ship this year, up to about 70 million in 2012, 90+ million in 2013, and 111 million in 2014.

(Click here to see 15+ other forecasts of the tablet market.)

At the same time, tablets remain no sure thing, says Mainelli. For one, user surveys show that tablets are not cannibalizing any other devices than netbooks.

An IDC survey from last December of those who had owned an iPad for more than 3 months found that 59% considered it a secondary device. Only 27% considered the iPad an outright replacement, while only 14% said buying an iPad delayed another purchase.

Also, companies aren’t yet buying tablets for employees en masse (78% do not). And due to failure to roll out device management software and write group polices, they are hesitant about letting employees bring their tablets in for work.

Only a small percentage of tablet-owning workers are allowed to access the corporate network (35%), access corporate e-mail (17%) or run business apps (18%).

“There is a very real possibility that media tablets will be the next netbook,” he said.

My take: I agree that tablets could experience a backlash that causes the hype bubble to burst. That would be result of too many similar, rushed-to-market Android tablets on the market. However, I think the chance of tablet sales actually halting their growth as quickly as netbooks did is basically nil.

I have to admit that I was surprised to hear that PCs will still total about 500 million in 2014, or nearly 5x media tablets. Smartphone shipments will total nearly 820 million by 2014.

“PCs and smartphones will remain devices we must have; netbooks and tablets are nice-to-haves,” Mainelli said.

PCs will need to evolve, of course, to stay successful. Apple and HP are good role models for other PC makers, he says. He likes Apple’s vertically-integrated model including its profitable App Store, and HP’s plan to install two operating systems (Windows and WebOS) on its hardware. In other vendors’ cases, they could look to install Android or Google Chrome as their secondary mobile OS.

He argues PC makers should create very customized experiences – much deeper than the UI overlays on top of Windows they have done in the past – including buying up cloud data synchronization vendors in order to roll out better-than-MobileMe services.

Big market researchers are rarely at the forefront of tech trends, as they must balance the viewpoints of startups, established vendors and enterprise IT buyers.

What firms like Gartner and IDC excel at is being a belwether for emerging trends, and providing empirical validation for them.

At its Directions 2011 conference in San Jose today, IDC Corp. analysts argued that we are entering the post-PC era of computing overflowing with data, devices and apps.

Ironically, this is a drum that SAP has been banging loudly for the past year. And gratifyingly, it is nearly identical to the Unwired Enterprise vision that Sybase has promoted since the middle of the last decade (see this whitepaper, which I had a hand in, summarizing this vision).

Here are some of the stats IDC shared, along with the implications.

1) Stat: It is 25 years (1986) since the industry began moving en masse towards client/server away from mainframes.

Implication: We are at similar transition from PC-server towards mobile devices. Already, there are “trillions of smart ‘things’ (sensors, devices, etc.), billions of users, millions of apps,” says Frank Gens, chief analyst for IDC.

2) Stat: 3 of the biggest companies that failed to transition to client-server were Cullinet (database maker that avoided new retailing model), Wang (word processor maker that chose CPU ignored by software developers) and Digital (overvalued by Wall Street).

Implication: Companies that made right moves made the leap: Dell (sold PCs by phone), EMC (took regular hard disks into the enterprise) and SAP (brought ERP from mainframe to client-server).

3) Stat: 80% of new enterprise apps to be distributed via the cloud. By 2014, 30% of enterprise application spending will be on the cloud.

Implication: Even enterprise apps will follow Apple’s App Store model, argues Gens.

4) Stat: There are 1.3 million mobile apps today, versus 50,000 to 75,000 PC applications, says Gens.

Implication: Most new apps will be vertical or industry-specific solutions.

5) Stat: 1.8 Zettabytes (1.8 billion TERABYTES) of data will be stored in 2011, up 47% year-over-year. That will grow to 7 Zettabytes in 2014.

Implication: “This is about BIG data,” says Gens, not relational databases. “This BREAKS traditional databases.”

6) Stat: 500 million smartphones and tablets to sell in 2011, versus 380 million PCs.

Implication: This is the transition year in which devices will pass PCs permanently.

7) Stat: Only 50% of smartphones and 20% of tablets in enterprise bought by IT, according to fall 2010 IDC survey.

Implication: Bring Your Own Device is huge, says IDC analyst Bob O’Donnell, and managers will need to account for that.

8) Stat: Worldwide, the average person affluent consumer owns 4.8 devices, according to a recent IDC survey. In the US, that is up to 6.6 devices.

Implication: The market is hugely fragmented.

(Updated March 23 with details about Sybase Professional Services) For the second installment of UTalkTooMuch, I’ll give the February 27th webinar by The Principal Consulting and Sybase the 500-words-or-less treatment. The two firms collaborated, along with SAP, to deploy a CRM application onto the iPad for General Mills, the huge maker of breakfast cereals (Lucky Charms, anyone?) and other packaged foodstuffs from my hometown of Minneapolis.

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Faster CPU. Videoconferencing. An HDMI video out for corporate presentations. These represented the grand total of what could charitably be labeled as new enterprise features in the iPad 2. Though that requires you to stretch the definition of enterprise as much as a pair of bicycle tights on a sumo wrestler.

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It was easy to doubt the iPad one year ago, especially its enterprise mojo. That was despite surveys showing strong interest for using the iPad at work.
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