Microsoft may be the best-known/most notorious, IBM the largest if you include revenue from its lucrative (read: expensive) services business, Oracle the largest if you include all of the software AND hardware acquisitions it is still cobbling together.
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Hey developers – what seems like a more financially-rewarding bet: A) Building an iPhone consumer app that will, if you are lucky, generate the average of 20 cents per paid and free download?* Or B) building an enterprise app for the iPhone aimed at a hugely profitable industry (think oil and gas, or banking) with millions of employees where the going rate could be $10 per app or more?
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At SAPPHIRE NOW on Tuesday, a panel of enterprise IT administrators dished about their deployments of tablets and smartphones. There was some frank kvetching - even with good tools, it isn’t always easy to keep up with the challenges of securing and managing mobile devices – but the panelists were ultimately positive.

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In chess, good players fight for control of the center of the board, knowing that a positional advantage will eventually translate into a material advantage, and then checkmate. Tech vendors play the same way, battling over the ecosystem of partners and developers, knowing that it will translate to paying customers – and victory – in the endgame.

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SAP AG has long led three huge markets for enterprise applications: ERP, CRM and business intelligence. At SAPPHIRE NOW on Monday, SAP executives confirmed the firm’s naked ambition to take over the small-but-ready-to-explode market for enterprise mobile apps.

SAP senior vice-president Nick Brown showed off a slew of new apps in four areas: retail execution, general worker productivity, field service and analytics.

Available for iOS and Windows Mobile devices, the retail app helps salespeople better manage store inventory, audit for compliance reasons, and, ultimately, boost revenue, said Brown.

The field service app, meanwhile, was co-built with Cisco Systems. It includes Near-Field Communications (NFC) capabilities, video collaboration and visualization. It is being released on Windows Mobile immediately, with Android and iOS versions to follow.

The new apps add to SAP’s two previously-existing mobile apps, co-created with Sybase: CRM and workflow.

SAP plans to unveil 30 more apps within the next six months, said Sybase senior vice-president Raj Nathan.

They include apps in the areas of sourcing, human capital management, sales and service, cross-topics, vertical industry-specific apps and financials, said Brown.

Sybase CMO Raj Nathan: SAP plans to release 30 new apps in next six months.

In addition SAP also unveiled a trio of customizable mobile apps in the areas of expense management, time entry and system alerts.

SAP calls these ‘app accelerators‘, according to Jeff Chua, a manager in SAP Consulting, for two reasons.

First, while all of the other SAP apps are being built by SAP’s Mobile Business Unit housed inside Sybase, the app accelerators were built by SAP’s Consulting team.

More importantly from the enterprise point of view, customers do not license and pay maintenance for SAP’s ‘app accelerators’, but instead just pay for the cost of customizing and implementing them, said Chua.

All of the apps and app accelerators discussed above run on top of the Sybase Unwired Platform.

Similar to how Microsoft builds both platforms and applications on those platforms, SAP is aggressively pursuing partners to build apps that connect with its server applications and run on top of the Sybase Unwired Platform. In that way, it hopes to build a pie large enough to sate itself as well as its ecosystem.

SAP has already garnered support for this approach, with at least a dozen apps on display from third-party vendors.

One example was Accenture, which showed off two apps: a mobile app store and device manager for enterprises, and another app aimed at field service technicians.

SAP bought Sybase last year just weeks before SAPPHIRE NOW, so there was no time to bring a major mobile presence to the show. This year will be different, with SAPPHIRE NOW’s first-ever mobility campus.

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For Horace Dediu, the influential mobile pundit behind the asymco blog, even his throwaway comments are more interesting than the best stuff of other analysts. Case in point: on Thursday, Dediu wrote that “feature tablets” are coming, and not only will be “analogous” to featurephones but also will “be viable as niche businesses quite soon.” Provocative stuff – though not totally correct in my opinion.

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I’ve seen a ton of enterprises and schools deploying iPads (well, more than 400 publicly-confirmed deployments – see the list) but these are the first sightings of large deployments of Android tablets and RIM PlayBooks I’ve seen.

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