I was reminded of this while attending the AppNation conference in San Francisco last month. In one room was a small exhibition space for vendors. Nearly every one of them had a cool-sounding-albeit-totally-made-up word for a company name, and an even cooler-sounding pitch for why their software was faster, cheaper, more feature-rich, or more transformative than the next guy’s.

Does that remind you of anything? For me, I felt like I had suddenly traveled back in time to the dot-com era, with its startups sporting silly names and no-hope products.

It was an uncomfortable feeling. And I’m not even an IT manager or CIO who actually has to vet these hundreds, nay, thousands of vendors to figure out what to buy and from whom.

Sure, if your company is just starting to get serious about mobility, that MDM software with the low license fee must be awfully tempting. Ditto for the visual developer platform that promises Apps Will Practically Write Themselves. Or the mobile BI app that promises your employees will compete to become the Mayor of Spreadsheetville.

I’m sure these products, in isolation and under ideal conditions, can do its job well. A greenfield deployment at a young, rising company with money to burn would be a good example.

But such enterprises represent 1% of the market at most. For the other 99%, they have legacy gear that may not be cutting-edge anymore but still works fine. They have established processes they don’t want to overhaul. They have finite budgets, IT manpower and time that they can devote to buying, integrating and deploying new technology.

What’s my point? It is, simply, that many freemium or point solutions can sound great in theory. But when deadlines loom, when startups go out of business, when resources are constrained, when processes need to be re-created or re-engineered, the cost and risk of such solutions often greatly outweigh their potential benefits. And that could create holes in your mobile infrastructure that sink your enterprise.

A Lifeline

Sometimes the better choice is choosing an integrated platform that gets you 90% of the way there while preventing 90% of the potential pain, cost and time before they arise.

This integrated mobile platform should not be constricting. We are no longer in the command-and-control era of IT, after all. IT needs to be just as Agile as their developer brothers and sisters.

Rather, this integrated platform needs to offer the choices that your employees and users want. That would include choice in mobile platforms (iOS, Android, RIM, Windows Mobile, and more) and choice in the type of app (native, Web, and hybrid).

How is an integrated platform different than the closed stack that some vendors push? For one, you should be able to choose whatever mobile devices you want. You should also be able to use whatever back-end server hardware you want. Finally, you should be able to pull from whatever data sources you need, using industry standard protocols.

Good CIOs think strategically, not tactically. They plan for the 5-year-cycle as well as the one-year cycle. They realize that penny-pinching or chasing trendy features can result in higher costs later when needs change (and they always do).

So an integrated platform may have a higher initial cost, but it should be able to scale and grow with you, rather than requiring constant expensive upgrades or migrations. And it should save you time and money over the long haul.

Do SAP and Sybase have a stake in this argument? Admittedly, we do. Together, we are striving to build just such an integrated mobile platform. We are knitting our Afaria MDM software together with the Sybase Unwired Platform for developers along with the many apps that SAP and SAP’s partners are building.

The benefits of integrated platforms, we believe, will be huge for most enterprises. Apps and services become much easier to roll out. Risks of failed or delayed deployments also drop. Chances that your vendors will halt innovation due to bankruptcy or acquisition also fall dramatically.

The SAP mobile platform isn’t for every enterprise. If your company restricts employees to one device type, for instance. Or if your CIO has no plans to evolve beyond letting employees check their e-mail and contacts on their smartphones or tablets.

But over time, such enterprises will represent 1% of the market at most. For the other 99%, an integrated platform may be the better choice.

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Last-minute notification: on Wednesday Feb 22nd, SAP is hosting a webcast with Kate Delimitros, a principal in SAP’s Value Engineering team and an expert in retail and mobile. Value Engineering takes a numbers and TCO based approach to helping you decide what parts of mobile may work for your enterprise. Sign up for the webcast here. Or listen to the recording and download the slides at the same location.

Many PaaS today seem to sacrifice features and/or customization in favor of one-size-fits-all scale. For ISVs, I truly believe that many multitenant cloud platforms today lack the flexibility to account for their security/regulatory requirements. Or that the benefits of a scalable new platform don’t always justify the cost of Apologies if my imprecise language caused any conflation/confusion. Obviously, this wasn’t meant to be an inadvertant criticism of SAP’s own cloud applications like BusinessByDesign or Successfactors.

(Post begins) It feels a little blasphemous to type this while Cloud Connect, the cloud industry’s premier conference, takes place just 30 miles away.

But sometimes when you see a balloon rising from all of the hot air filling it, you gotta take aim with the BB gun and pop it.

As most of you know, multitenancy is the term describing when a single instance of software serves dozens or hundreds of users/customers at the same time. Anyone can see how much more efficient this is versus the old server hosting model, where the ratio of server:customer is 1:1. Even using today’s Red Hat-type virtualization, each server can cram fewer users/customers onto itself than a true multitenant service.

Besides their efficiency, multitenant services can scale easily. Both of these mean lower costs for the hosters/software vendors, and, potentially, lower prices for customers.

It’s why Hotmail and Facebook were able to grow to tens of millions of customers before any meaningful revenue began rolling in. On the business side, Salesforce.com is multitenant, as is Successfactors, which my parent company SAP just spent $3.4 billion to acquire.

Outside of the application space, things are well, more stormy. Take the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) space. Providers here include Google App Engine, Windows Azure, Salesforce.com’s Database.com, and others.

For enterprises – who usually have much more rigorous requirements than consumers – a multitenant cloud platform has plenty of disadvantages. That goes double for the developers serving those enterprises.

1) It’s inflexible. Let’s say as your personal blow against globalization, you want Google to guarantee that your Gmail will only be stored on servers physically located in the U.S. Not. Going. To. Happen.

While that may be an esoteric request for a consumer, it is actually a requirement for businesses operating in Europe. There, strict national data privacy laws mean that data about French customers must be stored in servers located inside France, German customer data inside Germany, etc. As a result, cloud or hosted applications must be run from data centers in multiple countries. Most multitenant PaaS providers will find it difficult to make that happen.

Or let’s say you are a application vendor or ISV that happens to be blessed with multiple customers from the same industry. For competitive reasons, Coke may not want the risk of its secret formula being stored on the same physical server as data from its arch-rival, Pepsi.

This may not just be competitive paranoia; this too could be an law or industry regulation. Again, this is difficult for most multitenant PaaS providers to make happen today.

2) It’s less secure. Sure, cloud platform vendors will argue that their software, if run properly, isolates all user data and setting info from each other. However, there is always the potential for human carelessness or error. For instance, a database administrator can mistakenly implement a security policy that affects all of users of the service but actually contravenes the policies or rules that some customers need to abide by (due to above-mentioned national or industry rules).

Or let’s say a hacker is able to break the encryption of a database operated by a cloud service provider. If it’s a multitenant service, chances are he or she will be able to steal the data of dozens or hundreds of different business customers all stored on that database.

If the hosted service provider, however, stored each customer’s data on a different database, each with its own encryption key, then the hacker’s prize would be diminished. This is the upside of ‘less powerful’ software. Substitute hacker with “foreign government agent” and the possibilities get more chilling.

3) It’s less powerful. As mentioned before, most multi-tenant cloud services are created by Web 2.0 firms. What they may possess in fresh user interfaces and simplicity they lack in terms of features.

Take Database.com. The service doesn’t support applications written using the standard SQL language used by grown-up databases, notes ZDNet. Or Google App Engine, which has hard limits on the amount of data that users can store. Or Windows Azure, which hosts data in plenty of countries, but perhaps not the one that your customer requires.

In conclusion: cloud platforms may be perfect for webcentric developers looking for an easy-but-slightly-sophisticated way to store data. But for many others, a cloud platform will be too limiting. Also…

4) It may be more costly. Forget the temptingly-low utilization rate – what about the cost of rewriting your applications and porting your data over to this new platform? That can be a huge investment. For many smaller ISVs who serve small industry niches or sets of customers, the cost of porting over to a whole new platform may be too much for it to make sense.

A Better Choice?

For many enterprises and enterprise developers, what may make more sense are cloud-like platforms that offer the best of multiple worlds:

- the features and familiarity of regular relational databases;

- the security and flexibility of single-tenant software;

- the group management capabilities and the pricing model of multi-tenant services;

- and the low-touch, no-DBA-required stability of a mobile or embedded database.

The coming “Fuji” version of the SQL Anywhere database from my employer, Sybase, will offer all of the above, including a more developer-friendly pricing model that will be a first for Sybase.

If you are an enterprise or enterprise ISV, this may fit the bill better than some overhyped multi-tenant PaaS from one of the big boys.

To learn more, visit this link or read the blogs of the brains behind SQL Anywhere, including Eric Farrar (who kindly took the time to walk through this topic with me), Glenn Pauley, Chris Kleisath, Tom Slee and Jason Hinsperger.

The original poster child for Aspergers, Mr. Spock, would’ve replied “Fascinating.”

My reply is less ambiguous: “Abso-freaking-lutely 100% true.”

I use my iPhone incessantly for everything except talking on it. In the last 3 months, I only spent an average of 5 minutes per day actually speaking on my iPhone. Meanwhile, I sent and received many hundreds of e-mails, instant messages and SMS text messages.

This is one thing, by the way, that futurists have constantly gotten wrong. Just because the telephone was invented after the pen doesn’t mean that we want enhanced ways to talk to each other, i.e. the videophone. Turns out that given the choice, we prefer faster and more convenient ways to write to each other. Think of how our sci-fi shows would be different if they knew what we know now.

“B-E-A-M-[SPACE] M-E-[SPACE]-U-P, S-C-O-T-T-Y.”

My 8-year-old son wants to buy an iPod touch for himself with his Chinese New Year money. And I’m thinking of getting my wife an iPod touch as an adjunct to her Verizon cellphone, rather than switching her to an iPhone. Like me, she is app-crazy-but-talk-little. Sure, she would have to carry one extra device, but the savings are huge (about $1,200 over two years), as she is on the $30/month Nationwide 65 plan for seniors (note: you too can get this plan if you threaten convincingly to leave for a pay-as-you-go carrier).

Anyone on any sort of budget should weigh the same choice and strongly consider an iPod touch over an iPhone. About 90 million iPod touch owners – almost double the 55 million iPad owners – would agree.

(My estimate, by the way, is based on an Apple filing revealed last April, and adding up shipments in Apple’s subsequent quarterly filings, including 15.4 million iPod touches sold in its most recent quarter. Here’s how they compare with the iPhone, of which about 182.5 million have sold. See the chart below.)

Indeed, most people could save 55% ($1,000 versus $2,200 over two years) by getting the combination of an iPod touch + cellphone instead of an iPhone. If they skip the cellphone entirely, they would save about 91%.

And they wouldn’t miss out on much. Want to text? Try WhatsApp. Want to talk? Try Fring, Talkatone, Line2, or Skype.

Granted, there are disadvantages. The lack of 3G connectivity means that the iPod touch is no anytime, anywhere device. That’s Apple’s first big favor to the wireless carriers, and it’ll never change. The second way Apple favors the iPhone is by keeping the iPod touch one upgrade behind the iPhone. So the current iPod Touch 4th generation uses the single-core A4 processor that the prior-generation iPhone 4 does.

When should companies choose iPod over iPhone?

The prospect of saving 90% has many companies and universities making the thriftier choice.

The University of Virginia, Fairfax County Public Schools, Abilene Christian University, Boise State University, Bowdoin University, and the Pentagon are among the institutions that are using iPod touches.

The most impressive deployments I’ve heard of include Kearns High School in Utah, where all 1,600 students are using them, and Sears, which is deploying 11,000 iPod Touches (along with 5,000 iPads) to department store salespeople to help them look up inventory and customer orders.

So in what scenarios does an iPod touch make more sense than an iPhone for your company? Here are three:

1) If your company is extremely cost-conscious. As I said before, choosing an iPod touch over an iPhone results in 91% savings over two years. And what company isn’t cost-conscious these days?

2) For workers that are relatively immobile. Obviously, field service workers and salespeople need anytime, anywhere access to data and apps. But for companies that want to grant mainstream knowledge and office workers access to the sales analytics, HR and workflow apps, wi-fi access could suffice. Companies or schools that have built strong wi-fi connectivity on their campuses would be great candidates.

3) For companies that have flexible employee expense reporting. Low-cost or free wi-fi access continues to grow – think of Starbucks, with its thousands and thousands of locations, or the Google-sponsored access at many airports. But when employees are in dire need of checking their e-mail, they should be allowed to sign up for an ad hoc pass with Boingo with no fear that they’ll be hassled by someone in accounting over it. For companies that want to track or cap employee spending on Wi-Fi passes, they can use Mobile Device Management (MDM) software like Sybase’s own Afaria to do this Telecom Expense Management.

I had thought about listing no. 4 as “For companies that worry about shocking data roaming bills.” Because turning off cellular data will guarantee that there won’t be any surprises. On the other hand, a heavyhanded tactic like that will also guarantee that some high-level exec will angrily call your IT manager at 3 am because he or she can’t check their e-mail or voice messages while overseas. Rather, companies that want to stick with iPhones should plan on using MDM or TEM software to track/cap data roaming costs.

Do you or someone close to you own an iPod touch? Are the tradeoffs worth it? Could it make sense for use inside your company?

That’s 50,000 Mac and iOS devices total.

Now, as many of you know, I maintain a list of the iPad enterprise deployments, along with a separate list of the 50 largest iPad rollouts.

Based on what I’ve seen, IBM may be the largest Apple deployment out there, and the second-largest iOS mobile device deployment. Here is how I would rank it – anyone heard of other deployments that would break into this list?

1) Lowe’s is arming 42,000 salespeople with iPhones;

2) IBM

3) Korea Telecom gave away iPads to all 32,000 employees

4) SAP – 14,000 iPads and 6,500 iPhones = 20,500 total. What’s impressive about SAP’s deployment is that it involves almost 40% of all employees (it has 53,000). IBM has 450,000 employees, so its iOS deployment just makes up 9% of workers.

5) Genentech – 7,000 iPads and 10,000 iPhones = 17,000 total

6) Sears – 5,000 iPads and 11,000 iPod Touches = 16,000 total

7) United Airlines is aiming for the paperless cockpit with 11,000 iPads for pilots

(To learn about companies that are not only deploying mobile devices but taking advantage of them with enterprise apps, check out the videos at SAP.com. Watch Vodafone, Siemens, Verizon, Tommy Hilfiger, Charite Berlin hospital, Novo Nordisk, Computer Sciences Corp., Boston Scientific and 15 other large companies.)

IBM still has 30,000 employees using BlackBerry smartphones, according to mobility evangelist Chris Pepin, but that number is falling. It has another 20,000 employees using smartphones running Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and other platforms.

Other factoids from Pepin’s presentation, which is available on SlideShare here:

- IBM supports so many platforms for two main reasons: 1) to help its many services consultants harmonize with its enterprise customers by using the same gear; 2) as a recruiting tool for younger workers. “If a company required you to use a ThinkPad laptop and a BlackBerry phone, would you want to join? I know I would not,” Pepin said.

- most of the smartphones and tablets used inside IBM are owned by employees. That supports Strategy Analytics’ recent report that the vast majority of tablets inside companies today are Bring Your Own Device (BYOD).

- altogether, 100,000 IBM employees can do corporate e-mail, contacts and calendars from mobile devices. That’s up from 25,000 just several years ago.

- IBM uses a custom-built configuration software called Bluemac to automate installation of apps onto the iOS devices.

- standard apps include IBM’s Lotus Traveler and Lotus Mobile Connect (client-less VPN), while a smaller number get full VPN access, IBM Sametime instant messaging and IBM Connections, a collaboration tool that combines features from Facebook, SharePoint and Dropbox.

- the iPhones must be 3GS or later, and be running iOS 4.3 or later.

- there is an internal enterprise app store called Whirlwind for self-service, optional apps. Beta versions of IBM mobile apps are also offered to employees here. Whirlwind will give way to a new app store based on IBM’s Tivoli software, said Pepin.

- Employees are not restricted from using Apple’s App Store.

- IBM has just released the beta version of an MDM software called IBM Endpoint for Mobile Devices that runs on multiple platforms, including iOS, Android, Symbian, Windows Phone and others.

Let’s go through the filing in order of good news to bad.

Facebook said in today’s SEC filing that mobile is one of its five key, high-level strategies.

“We are devoting substantial resources to developing engaging mobile products and experiences for a wide range of platforms, including smartphones and feature phones. In addition, we are working across the mobile industry with operators, hardware manufacturers, operating system providers, and developers to improve the Facebook experience on mobile devices and make Facebook available to more people around the world. We believe that mobile usage is critical to maintaining user growth and engagement over the long term.”

We also learn that 425 million out of Facebook’s 845 million monthly users [MAUs} in December 2011 accessed the site from a mobile device:

However:

We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven.

The reason there’s no meaningful revenue is because Facebook doesn’t display any mobile ads today.

Besides the unknown of how much mobile ad revenue Facebook will be able to generate, there’s also the unknowns of competing with the likes of Google:

“Certain competitors, including Google, could use strong or dominant positions in one or more markets to gain competitive advantage against us in areas where we operate including: by integrating competing social networking platforms or features into products they control such as search engines, web browsers, or mobile device operating systems; by making acquisitions; or by making access to Facebook more difficult.”

Facebooks’ frenemies also include Apple. Cupertino’s demands to be cut in on any in-app advertising/sales action as well as its own mobile advertising plans might lead it into overt conflict with Facebook.

“We are dependent on the interoperability of Facebook with popular mobile operating systems that we do not control, such as Android and iOS, and any changes in such systems that degrade our products’ functionality or give preferential treatment to competitive products could adversely affect Facebook usage on mobile devices.”

This must be why Facebook made the seemingly-strange decision to cozy up to Microsoft several years ago, including taking investment money from Redmond.

So how might Facebook go after mobile revenues in the future?

“We currently do not show ads or directly generate any meaningful revenue from users accessing Facebook through our mobile products, but we believe that we may have potential future monetization opportunities such as the inclusion of sponsored stories in users’ mobile News Feeds.“

And finally:

“Our Payments system enables users to purchase virtual or digital goods from developers and third-party websites by using debit and credit cards, PayPal, mobile phone payments, gift cards or other methods. We have also extended our Payments infrastructure to support mobile web apps on certain mobile platforms.“

Since its founding eight years ago, the San Luis Obispo, Calif. company has grown to a $4-million-a-year firm on the strength of its mission: “to save the world, one gizmo at a time.” Unlike Gazelle or SellYourMac.com, which want to buy your used PCs and devices to resell, iFixit wants users to hold onto their gadgets as long as possible by giving them the tools and know-how to upgrade and repair them.

This might be novel to many consumers, but it probably resonates with anyone working in corporate IT, where boosting ROI and slashing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) have long been key goals.

Indeed, as enterprises enter the post-PC era, they are turning to iFixit to extend the lifespan of their iPads and Android smartphones along with their PCs. Half of the iFixit’s sales are to IT departments, said Wiens.

“We love IT guys, all of the guys we hang out with are IT guys,” he said.

I interviewed Wiens at Macworld iWorld last week, where he shared his recommendations on how companies can keep mobile gadgets going for as long as possible.

(Another way to extend your company’s mobile devices as long as possible: actively encourage your employees to install games like Angry Birds on them.)

1) Train your IT department to be as good at repairing and upgrading mobile devices as they are at PCs.

Sure, your company may have a service agreement with Apple on top of the regular device warranties, but it will always makes sense to build up in-house expertise to do routine things like replace batteries and more advanced tasks like upgrade components or replace damaged LCD screens and keyboards.

This is key since Lithium-Ion batteries start degrading after a year of recharges (I’m convinced one of the unspoken reasons why BlackBerries remain so popular among IT departments is the fact that their batteries are so easy to replace). And RAM requirements keep increasing, with bigger apps and more sophisticated Web sites.

But what if you don’t have any budget to send your support staff on expensive training courses? Not a problem, says Wiens, who argues that the best way to learn is by doing. At iFixit, newly-hired technicians don’t take any formal training courses. Rather, for two weeks, they sit in front of a PC logged into iFixit’s online repair manuals while taking apart and putting together gadgets. “They have to teach themselves,” Wiens said.

2) Make sure the devices you buy CAN be upgraded or repaired. This is an example of the tech industry’s attempt to impose “planned obsolescence” and force customers to buy new devices sooner than later, says Wiens, and Apple has long been the industry’s worst offender: putting batteries inside iPhones sealed with proprietary ‘Pentalobular’ screws for which no screwdriver existed (at the time), or soldering the RAM onto the motherboard of MacBook Airs.

Of course, iFixit wouldn’t have a business if Apple devices were easy-peasy to fix and upgrade. And Wiens acknowledges that some of the things that vendors do are in an attempt to comply with legal rules, or to enhance the durability of their gadgets. But he laments them, nevertheless. And he says making devices less repairable is a growing rather than shrinking trend, noting the Motorola Droid RAZR MAXX shown at CES. Its 21-hour battery is non-removable.

Hardware upgradeability is only one part of the equation. The other is software and operating system upgrades. Here, Apple is the winner, Wiens says, noting that 2.5 year old iPhone 3GS phones can run the latest iOS 5.

The same cannot be said of Android, he said, noting that many tablet vendors are foregoing the latest Ice Cream Sandwich update even on tablets less than a year old. Samsung is “terrible” in this regard, Wiens said.

In an ideal world, smartphones would be designed “to last as long as the network they are designed for,” Wiens said. That means a device should be designed to last 10 years, and its battery replaced 4-5 times.

That’s the ideal. In the real world, no company will be keeping devices anywhere close to that long, lest they create disgruntled employees. Despite the faster advances in mobile versus PC hardware, he thinks a 3-year lifecycle for smartphones and tablets is do-able. For now, only Apple, not Android vendors, seem able to support that, he said.

3) Demand that your vendors supply high-quality repair documentation. Apple is notoriously shy about releasing detailed manuals for its gadgets. Vendors like Dell, HP and Lenovo have traditionally been diligent about releasing documentation, though, Wiens says, “it’s not very good.” Android vendors, on the other hand, have been poor at delivering documentation.

iFixit has stepped in by creating a web site called Dozuki that lets vendors create photo-heavy documentation in the style of iFixit’s own repair manuals.

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The latest version of Sybase’s Afaria mobile device management (MDM) software includes integration with Business Objects, a new virtual machine appliance for faster installations, the ability to separately track corporate-owned versus individually-liable devices, and more. If you want to learn more, sign up for this Webinar on Thursday February 2nd at 10 am PT/1 pm ET.

And if you’re interested in learning more about the latest ways you can use mobile devices to enhance your company’s field service operations, register for this SAP webinar on Thursday February 16 at 8 am PT/11 am ET. Experts from SAP and Psion Corp. will be joined by Aberdeen Group analyst Sumair Dutta.

Macworld iWorld wasn’t just about exhibit halls full of cute, bizarre accessories for iPads and iPhones.

There was an enterprise track called MacIT, during which I heard a fascinating talk by Justin Rummel, a senior project manager at Qivliq Commercial Group, on Thursday.

Some of Rummel’s Dilbert-like anecdotes will be familiar to anyone who has worked in enterprise IT or deployed mobile devices (see this list of nearly 600 large-scale iPad deployments here).

Others highlight the type of measures that only an uber-security-conscious body with 3 million-plus employees must – and will – take.

As part of a federal green initiative, the Pentagon wanted to test the iPad as document e-reader for its executives. It brought Qivliq in, which set up several pilots of 20 to 40 iPads each last year.

Despite the fact that all of the documents would be unclassified, Rummel still had to go by the book – in this case, the Security Technical Implementation Guide, or STIG, which serves as the bible for how government PCs and devices must be configured and managed.

For instance, iTunes is wholly banned from government PCs – an obvious problem since iTunes is needed for synchronizing with and setting up new iPads. Using Rummel’s personal PC seemed out of the question, since only government-owned PCs are allowed on Pentagon networks. Any personal PC detected on a Pentagon network can be whisked away by security officials, and not returned for weeks or months.

“They kind of laugh at you if you ask if you can use a personal machine,” he said.

Bending, not Breaking, the Rules

To set up the new iPads, Rummel had to go onto the lawns of the Pentagon with his personal laptop and connect each iPad one by one to the iTunes store using a Mi-Fi mobile wireless hotspot. He doesn’t recommend this for everyone.

“If you’ve got 1,000 iPads to set up, this is not an efficient approach,” he said, dryly.

The Pentagon had many other restrictions. Prevent users from installing or deleting their own apps, taking pictures with the iPad camera, watching movies and TV shows and playing network games. It also asked Qivliq to move some default iPad app icons like Safari into hidden folders, and prevent users from swapping the custom Pentagon screen background for pictures of their family or kids.

Qivliq also set the iPad’s login and password settings to match the Pentagon’s BlackBerry smartphones. So complex passwords that had to be changed very 90 days, auto-lock of the device after 5 failed login attempts, etc.

Some of the policies the Pentagon asked for proved impossible using iOS 4 and the Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution of Good Technology, said Rummel. For instance, the Pentagon wanted Rummel to delete some of the apps built into iOS 4. Told that it was impossible, it settled for Rummel moving those icons into a different folder so that they “would be out of sight and out of mind” of the executive users. It also unsuccessfully sought to permanently turn off the iPad’s Airplane Mode.

In the first phase of the pilot, users were only able to use the Good PDF reader. That frustrated some of the beta testers. “‘You mean I can’t use e-mail or surf the Web? This is a rock,’ one guy told me, as he put it in his desk drawer,” Rummel said. In the second phase, the iPad’s Wi-Fi was turned on. In third phase, users were allowed secure access to their government e-mail, calendar and contacts after authenticating using a federally-mandated CAC smart card reader.

Once all of the engineering and configuration work was done, Rummel had to fill out forms attesting that he had followed the STIG procedures to a T. Documenting the work, he estimates, took 3 times as long as the actual work itself.

Even with all the painstaking configuration work and documentation, and the limited scope of the deployment, Rummel says the ROI of using the iPads should be just six months. “I guess the executives read a lot of paper,” he said.

Despite the pilots’ apparent success at meeting their objectives, the Pentagon hasn’t pushed ahead with a full iPad deployment yet. The reason is that the STIG governing iOS devices was released as a draft in 2011 but hasn’t been finalized, said Rummel.

Despite the New York Times basically declaring it to be on life support, Macworld iWorld had healthy opening day crowds on Thursday at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. 25,000 attendees are expected at the conference, which runs until Saturday, up 10% from 22,000 last year.

The 250 or so exhibitors at this year’s conference is an even better sign. The majority were offering apps or accessories for Apple’s mobile devices – not surprising considering that iPhones and iPads outsold Macs by 7:1 and 3:1 in the most recent quarter. The diversity was interesting and colorful, and in its own way, compared favorably to a stroll through CES or or Tokyo’s famed electronics district, Akihabara.

Many thanks to Nick Rose, whose photos are intermingled with my own below. His are the sharper ones with his name watermarked on them. See the rest of his photos at Flickr.

The most popular category of accessory is, of course, the case. There were dozens of cases on display, ranging from the colorful and fashion-y:

to the silly:

The Intoxicase seems like it was created by some frat bros after an intense game of beer pong: an iPhone case with a bottle opener glued to the back of it. The Intoxicase comes with an app which uses the iPhone’s gyroscope to detect and tally how many beers you’ve opened. The app can also play your college football team’s fight song. $25 gets you one of these gag gifts.

I never thought I would need to attach an iPhone to the outside of my clothes using rare earth magnets, but after talking to BodyDock creator, Art Rojas, I was practically sold. The BodyDock is not aimed at desk jockeys like myself, but Real Men of Action: crowd control guys, soldiers and policemen like Roja’s son. Compared to a belt clip, Rojas says a BodyDock is more convenient and “won’t pinch the heck out of you” (he didn’t have to spell out that it was more manly, too).

Fun fact: Rojas said his company manufactured the carrying bags for the Apple //c computer back in the late 1980s. The two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) even accompanied him on a trip to Rojas’s factory in Korea, as they were so impressed with the workmanship on the bags, he says.

The ArtCase from Solid Line Products combines photos or paintings with a protective cover. These can be noted artists chosen by Solid Line, or artwork you find on Etsy or elsewhere, according to Solid Line CEO, Henry Lo (above).

Not a case but a handle: the FlyGrip is a little L-shaped piece of plastic that attaches to the back of your iPhone so you can hold and use the touchscreen with one hand. Keep your jokes to yourself, please.

Here are some USB drives encased in coneheaded plastic versions of the Batman and the Joker (the classic 60s-era Cesar Romero one, not the Heath Ledger one). The USB drives from Mimobot start at about $15. The most popular one, if its Web site is to be believed, is a 2 GB Hello Kitty USB drive.

This was a clever, attention-getting tactic by Polk Audio: have a gymnast do flips on a trampoline while wearing its no-fall-out sports earbuds.

Polk also had a snowboarder doing tricks on the same trampoline while rocking out on those UltraFit earphones.

Keyboards are another popular genre. These Mac keyboards are aimed at graphic designers or video editors who can benefit from these keyboard shortcuts for Final Cut or Avid. I’d never heard of these, but then again, I don’t get out much.

The BulletTrain Express is a wireless keyboard lap tray, perfect for your Mac Mini-as-Home Theatre PC. At $79, it is for the Mac (or South Park) fan who has everything.

Naturally, there is a lot of art (digital drawings, photos, computer animation) on display at Macworld, as well as actual artists. I think this is somehow related to an iPad painting app. I mostly remember being impressed with how fast he finished them.

This mobile iPad cart is from Portland, Oregon-based Anthro. It holds and charges 40 iPads and costs $1,499. Aimed at school classrooms and hospitals, the carts have separate locks for the front for the students/nurses, and the back for the IT staffers when they want to fix the charging cables.

By the way, if the name Anthro sounds familiar, that’s because they were one of the original makers of ergonomic computer furniture, including this much-imitated narrow, moveable metal computer desk. According to co-founder Cathy Filgas, a new AnthroCart still sells for the original price of $299.

According to Strategy Analytics analyst Gina Luk, 30 million tablets purchased around the world last year were used inside companies, organizations or schools. Luk calls those ‘business tablets,’ and their usage grew 405%, from 7.4 million in 2010.

Of those 30 million tablets, only one-sixth (5 million) were ‘corporate-liable,’ meaning they were purchased or reimbursed to an employee by a company, said Luk. The vast majority (25 million) were ‘personally-liable,‘ meaning that employees purchased them using their own money and brought them into work via BYOD policies.

Taking the entire 2011 tablet market (about 67 million says Strategy Analytics-see other market estimates here) in 2011, 37% were bought by consumers for use at work, says Luk. 55% were purchased by consumers but used for recreation only, with only 8% actually bought or reimbursed by companies.

Three factors are driving the rise in business tablets, says Luk: BYOD demand from workers, ongoing drops in tablet prices (about 10-15% this year alone, predicts Luk) and increased marketing from enterprise-focused system integrators.

And driven by the increased supply in enterprise apps, Luk expects corporate-purchased tablets to double to 18% to 20% of the overall market by 2015, up from 8% in 2011. Financial service firms and healthcare organizations will be the fastest adopters.

“Android will catch up, but we still see Apple’s iPad dominating in this market,” she said.

Lust, Caution

Despite the demand for tablets at work, the trend is already starting to slow down. After growing fourfold from 2010 to 2011, Luk expects the number of business tablets to grow just 33% to 40 million tablets this year, and only another 40% over the following three years to 56.2 million business tablets sold in 2015.

Why the extreme slowdown? According to Luk, blame a backlash against BYOD by companies suddenly worried about the security and management holes they may be creating.

“With growth in BYOD, we also see it will present major threats with access to the corporate network,” said Luk. “Thus enterprises will take precautions to evaluate their internal needs. Uptake of tablets will become gradual and not a sudden year-over-year jump.”

She also cited BYOD’s unpopularity outside of North American firms, due to strict data privacy laws in Europe and the unfamiliarity with the concept in Asia.

My take: European data privacy laws are indeed a formidable obstacle, but they can be overcome by motivated CIOs and the right mobile device management (MDM) tools. My parent company, SAP, is using new features in Sybase Afaria to separate corporate and individual data on mobile devices, thus satisfying EU regulations around individual data rights.

Also, I think Luk underestimates the uptick in corporate-liable adoption of tablets that will be driven by enterprise apps. I’ve profiled a number of companies that adopted tablets because of a desire to use one particular app: British insurer Aviva, which is using a custom-built app running on BlackBerry PlayBooks to mobilize its field reps, General Mills, which arms its salespeople with an SAP CRM app and others. This, I think, will grow, as companies reap the ROI of such deployments.

Without the PlayBook, RIM is a $19 billion-a-year smartphone giant, which remains both very profitable (17% net profit margin, higher than IBM, HP, Samsung, HTC and, um, SAP) and fast-growing (its global user base today is 75 million, up 50% from 15 months ago).

With it, RIM looks like a fallen star. If RIM’s fallen, can it get back up? Contrary to most, I think it can. The problems around the PlayBook 1.0 were largely tactical and self-inflicted. I agree with new CEO Thorstein Heins’ strategy: focus on execution, including launching new, faster, and bigger PlayBooks and shoring up its software.

What else can RIM execute better? Seeing how as Heins is already being bombarded with unsolicited advice, here are my four Monday Morning CEO suggestions.

1) Keep the PlayBook prices low. Right from the get-go, RIM needed to undercut the iPad on price, to make up for the PlayBook’s dearth of apps.

Even a temporary $100-$200 discount would’ve juiced the PlayBook’s sales, giving it the traction to attract developers, which would’ve translated into apps, which would’ve translated into more sales, creating the virtuous cycle that iOS and Android enjoy today.

RIM belatedly cut the PlayBook’s price just before Christmas. The sale is going on until February 4 (or January 28, depending on the report). You can still get a 64 GB PlayBook for $299. Amazon.com is selling the 16 GB model for $250.

This is a good move. But RIM shouldn‘t stop. It needs to keep aggressively pushing Playbooks into the market so by the time it reports earnings in late March, it can wow the industry with millions and millions of PlayBooks sold. I’m hoping this is RIM’s plan, and that the $485 million charge it took on the PlayBook in the December was to enable this.

As RIM releases new models with more powerful chips and faster networking, it can slowly raise their price again. In the meantime, RIM needs to…

2) Focus on the OS. RIM has ridden its vaunted keyboards and ancillary applications like texting and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) so long and so high that they’ve become a bit of a crutch. To be accepted as first-class platform player equal to Apple and Google, RIM needs to deliver on the technical goods with the PlayBook OS.

The first step is releasing a flawless version of PlayBook OS 2.0 on schedule (the rumor is now Feb. 17). Ideally, this would include a fast, bug-free Android app player, as well as a native PlayBook OS SDK for developers.

The second step is to quietly accelerate its work on delivering BBM and BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) to the PlayBook. BBM has 50 million users and has driven RIM’s popularity outside of the United States in the past few years. The latter BES delivers the corporate e-mail access that RIM is known for.

It’s unclear where RIM is on the development of those features. What if RIM suddenly delivered near-flawless versions of these apps for the PlayBook in the next several months? I think the market would be very impressed.

The third step would be to incorporate BBM and BES into the BlackBerry 10 (BB10) operating system. That’s reportedly due for release on the BlackBerry London smartphone this fall. London will be entering a high-end smartphone market that is far more competitive than the tablet market was a year ago. So it will need all of the differentiators it can get.

3) Focus again on enterprises. RIM took lots of steps to try to convince us that it wasn’t all-work-and-no-play. It paid millions of dollars to sponsor bands like Black-Eyed Peas, U2 and John Mayer. It made sure every Hollywood party goodie bag was filled with a BlackBerry phone. Don’t believe me? Check out celebrityblackberrysightings.com.

Even the name the PlayBook was an attempt to make the tablet sound fun, despite the lack of actual, you know, games.

This strategy plays against the PlayBook’s built-in strengths, strengths such as security and e-mail that appeal not just to IT managers, but end users, too.

Take Cale Dansbee, an IT manager for San Diego defense contractor, Ausgar Technologies Inc. He ran a six-week pilot of the PlayBooks at his 100-employee company late last year.

“Before I could finish it, most of my senior managers were sold and wanted one,” he said. The PlayBooks provided “extra screen real estate” for e-mail and other tasks in a familiar interface. “It really hit the sweet spot for them. We were really surprised, because managers are fairly finicky. They like what they like, and are quick to judge.”

Dansbee plans to roll out about 25 PlayBooks, mostly to Ausgar’s managers. Did Dansbee trial any iPads with them? “Yeah. Their reaction was that ‘It’s fun and neat, but it doesn’t do what I need to do.’”

Ausgar’s not alone. There are actually some companies already using PlayBooks today. The Royal Bank of Scotland. UK insurer, Aviva. Sun Life Financial.

And despite the iPad’s strong sales, few companies have committed themselves yet to a single tablet platform.

Of the estimated 30 million tablets purchased last year that were used at work, only one-sixth were actually bought by the companies themselves, according to Strategy Analytics analyst Gina Luk. The vast majority of tablets were purchased by the workers themselves and brought in via Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies.

Also, the global tablet market is forecast by firms like Gartner to grow to 208 million by 2014.

Translation: the tablet market remains early and up for grabs.

4) Spare no expense to woo developers. BlackBerries were so secure and beloved by IT managers because there were so few fun, time-wasting apps on them. In the Consumerized age, that’s no longer a virtue, but a detriment.

There are obvious things that RIM needs to deliver. The aforementioned Android app player, for one, Support for cross-platform HTML5 and Adobe Air apps, for another.

But the long-term viability of the PlayBook and its smartphone cousins depends on RIM attracting many more native PlayBook developers than it has today. Judging by the 4,000 or so apps available for the PlayBook today, that’s a small number. There are 330,000 apps for Android Marketplace and 600,000 for Apple’s App Store.

RIM has some recent high-profile developer wins. At CES, game maker EA and car maker Porsche both showed off PlayBook apps. I’ve heard of rumors of big-name ISVs in the enterprise space preparing PlayBook apps.

To win more than a few select ISVs, however, RIM needs to do more than talk up the average selling prices (ASPs) of BlackBerry apps, and put some cold hard cash on the table. This could involve slashing its cut of revenue from sales via App World, or paying ISVs to port popular iPad apps to PlayBook.

Such financial incentives could still be effective if run for a limited time, or capped at a particular dollar amount. But the rules of platform economics dictate that for RIM to come from behind, it will need to take extraordinary steps to build a substantial developer ecosystem.

For them, sexy consumer devices have traditionally been either an annoyance, creating discontent among workers grumbling why they cannot get a similar piece of gear for work, or a real pain, as workers try to sneak those unauthorized gadgets into the office, creating security and management headaches.

That sort of retrogressive, grumpy point-of-view was exemplified by a recent CIO Insight article with the pearl-clutching headline, “CES 2012: 10 New Products Every CIO Should Fear.” Gadgets that were supposed to strike fear in the heart of IT managers everywhere included Android devices (security!) and Ultrabooks (budgets! security!).

I don’t know what year the CIO Insight writer thought he was in, but back in the year 2012, most CIOs realize that the Consumerization of IT is in full swing, and that they need to treat the merch on display at CES as things they’ll be needing – and, frankly, wanting – to buy and manage for their employees.

CIO Magazine, for instance, pointed out that gesture interface technologies like Kinect might make an impact at work sooner than you expect, while waterproofing sprays for protecting mobile devices are a no-brainer for any CIO with a field-service mobile deployment.

And some CIOs like SAP’s Oliver Bussmann, are actually walking the aisles of CES to get a first-hand preview of what’s coming down the pipe.

Bussmann, as readers of this blog already know, is no ordinary enterprise CIO. He’s deployed 14,000 iPads and 8,000 iPhones to SAP employees, launched a global Bring Your Own Device program and created a self-service, internal Enterprise App Store with dozens of apps. Bussmann is also pushing ahead on Android device deployments, and is building a more secure alternative to DropBox for employees to use.

In the following video, Bussmann gives his quick take on five technologies and trends he saw on display at CES this year, along with what their impact could be for businesses like SAP’s (my parent company happens to be one of the 70 largest public corporations in the world).

These run from things you’ve probably heard of – the increasing use of mobile video in unified communications systems for real-time conferencing – to others you might not have heard of (the coming wave of sensor-equipped consumer devices will translate into a $50 billion business for enterprise vendors, predicts Bussmann).

Click here to watch the video if you have difficulties with the link above.

Aviva has armed 120 of its property risk reps with the much-maligned RIM tablet and a custom-built electronic form app that it hopes will boost their productivity by threefold.

Headquartered in London, Aviva is the sixth-largest insurance company in the world, with 46,000 employees and more than $90 billion in annual revenue.

The troubles of RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook tablet are well-documented. So why did Aviva choose the PlayBook?

“Blackberry devices, their software and a support process were already well established within this particular region of the Aviva Group,” said Paul Heybourne, senior project manager at Aviva, in an e-mail interview. “This, coupled with the security aspects of the Playbook and the ergonomics of the device, helped form the decision for it to be our tablet of choice” for this pilot.

Formicary Collaboration Group built the SOLAR app, its second for the PlayBook. Formicary built one of the first corporate apps for the PlayBook for RBS, or the Royal Bank of Scotland.

The RBS Global Banking and Markets app (watch the video here) allows professional money managers to track and read research on fixed income, commodities and currencies while on the go. Released in June 2011, the app does not yet allow clients to actually trade via the PlayBook yet, though RBS has said that is a possibility in the future.

For RBS, Formicary built the app using HTML 5 and other Web standard technology, employing four developers who worked non-stop over two months, said Alistair Milne, Formicary’s project manager for the Aviva project, via phone.

For Aviva, Formicary instead chose to use Adobe Systems’s AIR platform and Flash, instead.

With RBS, “the technical demands were more around the exchange of data,” Milne said. But with Aviva, “one of the requirements was to be able to send [completed] forms back to specified e-mail addresses.”

“As a device, the PlayBook is actually very solid and feels remarkably mature. But there were certain things missing in version 1.0 of the PlayBook’s operating system,” said Milne, that prevented them from using HTML5. Things the PlayBook v1.0 lacked include a native e-mail client as well as a true Software Development Kit (SDK).

Aviva hopes the easy-to-use UI of its PlayBook app will boost the productivity of its field reps three-fold.

As a result, Formicary used the Adobe platform to write a custom e-mail client that enables the app to e-mail back PDF documents with embedded photos taken by the PlayBook-wielding surveyor from the property site.

Despite Apple’s criticism of Flash as being crash-prone and slow on mobile devices, Milne said that hasn’t been the case at all.

“It’s very stable and fast. Flash is actually more responsive than HTML 5 right now, especially the more complex the user interface is,” he said. “The only lag is when you start up the PlayBook. Once the app is up and running, there is no lag on the PlayBook’s virtual keyboard, either. They [Aviva] got the experience that they wanted.”

Speeding up the surveyors

Replacing pen-and-paper forms and surveys with computer or tablet-based ones has many benefits. It improves accuracy by avoiding the extra step of having to re-type data from paper into computer database. It is faster and also less expensive over the long run.

But creating the SOLAR PlayBook app was more difficult than simply listing a bunch of questions in a certain order. The way a surveyor gathers information on-site varies greatly depending on the type of property. A warehouse is different from a store is different from a large, multi-floor office building, etc.

This meant that users would often have to jump back and forth between sections of their survey. “We couldn’t force you to follow a very specific flow, had to be very flexible. Because if you’re interviewing the owner of a property and he tells you something, you need to be able to very quickly put that information in the right place,” Milne said.

In other words: Aviva wanted the app to accommodate the surveyors’ existing workstyle as much as possible, not force surveyors to conform to a restricted, possibly-arbitrary flow. This, it felt, was key to ensuring that surveyors would embrace the app, as well as to improving their productivity.

In terms of the user interface, Formicary wanted to make sure that when users were holding the PlayBook in a normal position, the “thumbs can reach all of the screen,” Milne said. Formicary also wanted to maximize the amount of structured data collected, and minimize the amount of free text that users would type in. That meant as many ‘Yes or No’ questions as possible, along with checkboxes, draggable sliders, and more.

The worst possible outcome from using this app is if a surveyor leaves his or her tablet at a site, or has it stolen, leaving the reports compromised. To minimize that risk, the reports are wiped from the PlayBook once they are sent back to Aviva’s server. In-process forms are protected by Adobe’s Air technology, which helps ensure that local files cannot be accessed.

What’s the ROI?

The key performance metrics Aviva hopes the PlayBook will improve include: shortening the time for surveyors to collect data while visiting properties, speeding up the time to produce reports and reducing data errors.

The overall goal is ambitious: to enable surveyors to go from an average of 2 site visits a day to 4-6 property visits. That would essentially double or even triple their productivity.

By Aviva’s standards, this is a small first step, with total project costs reportedly around $50,000.

The pilot is still in very early stages. But early reports from the testing stage are “very encouraging,” Heybourne said. “It brings improved workload management to our advisers, faster resolution times to our customers and higher caliber reporting for our underwriters.”

“The form factor, ergonomics and robust feel of the PlayBook has been very well-received by the users,” he continued. “Our findings so far, including live trials demonstrate that the Playbook fulfills the requirements that we were looking for from this discrete pilot.”

Neal Fiske, whose job in business development for Formicary requires him to keep up with financial service customers, says that interest in the PlayBook in this sector is stronger than media reports would suggest.

“Any organization that has a predominance of BlackBerries is absolutely looking at the PlayBook,” he said. “The multi-tasking is better than iOS in most peoples’ opinions. We’ve seen the previews of version 2.0 of the PlayBook OS. If they fill in the existing gaps, and in particular, bring in a full set of APIs, that will go a long way. You don’t need something like the size of an iPad for business.”

If successful, this app “sets a precedent throughout the Aviva Group. And it becomes something of a beacon or lighthouse for the PlayBook in the enterprise,” Fiske said.

Or as Aviva’s Heybourne tantalizingly puts it, “Any field force role where data collection is required could benefit from this type of device.”

I’ll lead off with Genentech, the Bay Area biotech firm that is now a subsidiary of Roche. Their 7,000 iPad rollout was news to me, and ranks them sixth on my list of largest iPad deployments in the world.

(View the entire list of more than 530 enterprises that have publicly-confirmed iPad deployments here).

According to mobile application team manager, Paul Lanzi, Genentech has standardized on Apple for mobile, with 17,000 iOS device users worldwide (so by inference, 10,000 iPhones, though it surprises me less and less when I hear about companies deploying iPod Touches, too).

All of the Apple devices are corporate-owned, as the company doesn’t do Bring Your Own Device (BYOD).

Genentech does have 15,000 BlackBerry users, but they are only allowed to do e-mail, no apps. It doesn’t support Android due to the fragmentation-related hassle. “It’s a really tricky one,” Lanzi said.

While many firms talk about how their device deployments are driven by the ROI they hope to get from using apps, Genentech is actually following through. The company has deployed 60-some apps to employees. Indeed, Genentech rolled out its first mobile Web page even before the iPhone was released, said Lanzi. “We’ve already retired some apps,” he said.

The app that LanziJames Musick, director of social media and Web communications at Genentech, was most proud of was Genentech’s app for its popular corporate intranet, which recently won an award for its usability. According to LanziMusick, it’s not uncommon for several hundred employees to comment on a posted article, or for an article or posting to get 1,000 or more votes of ‘like’ or ‘dislike’. Extending the intranet to iPhone and iPad has significantly contributed to the activity.

LanziMusick says Genentech is hopes to extending the app so that employees can write status updates and check-in to various locations on the Genentech campus like the cafeteria, auditorium, or particular branch office – just like people check into their favorite bar or restaurant on Foursquare today. In testing today, the app should be fully live by February, said Musick.
To date, most Genentech apps are custom-built. Security is eased by the fact that they all data is transmitted via a common Web Services Bus, Lanzi said. Genentech is belatedly starting to offer VPN access now.

Lanzi does expect Genentech to buy more off-the-shelf apps now that the selection is growing. These will be nominated by Genentech employees, not IT, he said. That’s a tangible sign that employees are gaining power on IT decisions impacting them.

Can apps be ‘spammy’?

Another interesting enterprise user was medical journal publisher, Elsevier, which was candid about the problems its had pursuing its aggressive app marketing strategy.

The Dutch company has created 150 iOS apps mirroring the content from well-known journals like the Lancet, according to senior vice-president Scott Virkler.

(To learn about how healthcare’s embrace of mobility has also turned dangerous, read here.)

That has caused problems with Apple, which apparently considers Elsevier’s approach to be “spammy,” hypothesizes Virkler, as it rejected three Elsevier’s apps from the App Store last week.

Virkler blames Apple’s bias towards thinking of apps in terms of distinct features, rather than distinct content. Aggregating multiple journals into a single app, as Apple wants Elsevier to do, said Virkler, doesn’t make sense since the audiences for something like the Journal of Cardiology and The Sleep Medicine Review differ greatly.

Virkler does admit that Elsevier’s apps, as they are today, don’t add much value over the journal articles other than bringing them to devices. There are plans to change that, by adding relevant content such as medical databases related to that field or specialty. And possibly prodded by Apple, but Elsevier is also thinking of creating new apps centered around specific topics that would aggregate content from different journals.

SAP CIO Oliver Bussmann gave the keynote speech at AppNation, talking about how SAP has deployed 40-some apps internally to 14,000 iPad users, which ranks it the second-largest user of iPads today. That figure could go grow to 20,000 iPads by year’s end.

If you want to read more about SAP’s aggressive mobile plans for 2012, including around Android, BYOD and apps, read more here. Or if you want to learn more about how SAP is building its own secure, enterprise-friendly alternative to DropBox, read here. Or if you are an enterprise developer wanting to hear more about SAP’s Enterprise App Store and the growing partner ecosystem around it, read this.

By old-school, formal definitions, Ultrabooks are not ‘devices’. They sport Intel CPUs and run Microsoft Windows – two products and vendors that carry the banner for the PC era.

The Lenovo Yoga’s flexible chassis helps it convert from UltraBook to tablet.

Also, UltraBooks have keyboards and screens that nearly match the size of traditional laptops. So does their price, at about $1,000.

But let’s ignore specs – which, after all, most consumers do – in favor of user experience. By that paradigm, Ultrabooks are definitely mobile. And when Windows 8 arrives later this year, Ultrabooks will definitely act more like devices than PCs. That has huge implications for the enterprise. Here’s why:

1) Windows 8 Ultrabooks will boot ultra-fast.

In this time-obsessed society, the instant-on convenience of smartphones and tablets is one of their biggest advantages over Windows laptops. For instance, for all of 2010 and part of 2011, I was forced to use a 4-year-old Dell Latitude D630 laptop running Windows XP Pro for work. Not only was the D630 an unintended homage to neo-Brutalist architecture at its ugliest, but I got to know every well how loooonnnggg it took to boot every morning.

Well, here’s a home-made video showing Windows 8 booting on a D630 laptop with a regular spinning hard drive in just 8 seconds.

By comparison, it takes my 2010 iPad 25 seconds to cold boot, and my iPhone 4 an even longer 35 seconds to boot. In other words, three to five times longer.

Here’s another video, this one from Microsoft, showing a Windows 8 laptop, probably running a faster Solid-State Drive, seemingly booting in under 5 seconds.

(Even more impressive is this video of an ARM-based Samsung tablet apparently cold-booting Windows 8 almost as quickly as my iPad wakes from sleep mode. But let’s not digress.)

As commentators rightly point out, many of the videos today depict stripped-down Developer Editions of Windows 8, which lack many of the start-up items and services in actual shipping copies of Windows. Also, these are presumably fresh, clean installs of Windows 8. So no apps, no spyware, no registry gunk, etc. to slow things down.

Also, in practice, most users won’t be cold-booting their PCs or devices, they’ll prefer to the faster wake-from-sleep-mode. That’s something Windows has always been less reliable at than smartphones or tablets. It remains to be seen whether Windows 8 Ultrabook users will be able to comfortably put their machines to sleep, or whether they’ll choose to go with the slower but more reliable hibernate mode instead.

Still, I’m hopeful that with the pressure iOS, Android and other mobile OSes are putting on Microsoft, the new Windows 8 will start acting a lot more like them, rather than the Blue-Screen-of-Death Windows we used to hate.

2) Ultrabooks are skinny and light, just like a tablet.

For instance, Ultrabooks come very very close to matching tablets in the skinny-as-a-rail category. My iPad is about 13 mm thin. The coming Acer Aspire S5 is a mere 15 mm thin at its thickest point, despite operating under the handicap of having a keyboard.

By length and width, Ultrabooks also start to approach tablet-esque proportions. The same goes for weight. The typical business-class laptop weighs 4-6 pounds. Most Ultrabooks tip the scales at half of that, between 2.5 to 3 pounds. That is closer to the 1.3 pound iPad.

The bottom line: unless you are tween or a petite woman who refuses to carry anything but tiny, tiny purses, you should be able to tote an Ultrabook around in your bag of choice.

The other way Ultrabooks are akin to tablets is that many of them are convertible, meaning they can be used in either keyboard mode or touch-tablet mode. See the exciting Lenovo Yoga, which is the apparently the first bendable laptop. Speaking of touch…

3) Ultrabooks will sport all of the sensors and inputs standard on devices.

Multi-touch swiping? Check. An accelerometer so you can play games by moving the laptop around in the air? Check. Siri-like speech recognition as well as Xbox Kinect-like in-air gestures? That’s coming, too, says Intel.

4) Battery life will be excellent.

To be considered mobile, a device should enable a user to work for an entire business day (8 hours) without a recharge. Most Ultrabooks come very close to a true 8 hours of computing, while some top that. Both the HP Folio 13 and the Envy 14 Spectre can do 9 hours. Expect more Ultrabooks to beat that.

5) Ultrabooks will invade businesses via Bring Your Own policies.

People talk about fancy smartphones and tablets being ‘executive jewelry,’ but their popularity has devalued them as status symbols. No, whenever I go to tech conferences, it’s the executives who pull out the MacBook Airs who get the sidelong glances of envy. I guarantee you that most of those are personal laptops that employees had to pester their IT manager to be allowed to use.

After all, when the ‘Bring Your Own…’ movement was kicking into gear late last decade, IT managers were calling it Bring Your Own Computer, not Bring Your Own Device, since they figured it would be fancy laptops like the MacBook Air that employees would want to bring to work.

Well, the recession hit, and Bring Your Own Computer failed to take off. Instead, consumers instead focused their energy on bringing their iPads and Droid phones to work.

But now that BYOD has blazed the trail, expect companies to be much more open to BYOC, especially if that laptop is running a version of Windows.

Also, I consider Ultrabooks to be the evolutionary descendent of Thin-and-Light class notebooks – the Homo Sapien to the Thin-and-Light’s Homo Erectus (netbooks in this analogy would be an evolutionary dead end, like Neanderthals). That means they are still consumer-class devices, meaning that for now most companies won’t buy them for employees. The compromise, I believe, will be allowing personal Ultrabooks into the workplace.

My parent company is not only one of the leading enterprise mobility vendors with 17.5 million mobile users, but its internal deployment of mobile devices, software and apps is a role model for the rest of the Fortune 500.

I caught up with CIO Oliver Bussmann last week to get a recap of what SAP accomplished in 2011, and what its big plans are for 2012.

By the way, you can catch Bussmann in person at two places this week: CES, where he’ll be part of a panel about the Consumerization of IT this Wednesday 9-10 AM, and at the AppNation Enterprise Summit in San Francisco on Thursday morning, where he’ll be giving the keynote speech.

You can also catch Bussmann online, tweeting away at @sapCIO via one of the three devices he’s bringing on his U.S. tour: a Samsung Galaxy II S smartphone, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet, or Amazon Kindle Fire.

iPad Usage Still Growing

I first spoke with Bussmann in September 2010, after SAP had deployed a then-impressive 1,000 iPads. He said that within 12 months, SAP could have 17,000 employees using iPads.

I remember stifling, well, not a giggle, but something. Having experienced first-hand how slowly companies much smaller than SAP moved, 17,000 iPads seemed, frankly, preposterous.

It wasn’t just bureaucracy. There are huge technical challenges for massive device deployments. More than one CIO had told me how it took them several years to plan and then execute upgrades to new versions of Windows.

Well, SAP ended 2011 having deployed 14,000 iPads to 53,000 employees scattered all over the world. That includes all of its salespeople, a high proportion of IT staffers and developers, as well as many managers and senior executives.

That ranks SAP as the second-largest user of iPads in the world, behind only Korea Telecom, which gave iPads to all 30,000 employees a year ago (but hasn’t done much since).

SAP’s rollout was different. Every iPad came with a suite of useful enterprise apps. Salespeople and managers got CRM and BI dashboards, along with the standard e-mail and VPN. These made the iPads more than toys, but real tools.

Besides coming impressively close to reaching its pie-in-the-sky target, SAP also did these deployments without hiring any additional IT staff, said Bussmann. This was enabled by SAP’s use of the Sybase Afaria mobile device management (MDM) software, which helps SAP blast through a 3,000 user deployment in just six weeks.

“Because we are so automated here, the amount of effort for an IT administrator to deploy an iPad is really zero, especially compared to a laptop which everyone has to touch,” he said.

SAP is continuing to deploy a thousand devices per month. It is starting to hit SAP’s office-bound knowledge workers, who Bussmann teasingly calls “mobile wanna-bes.”

“I don’t see the trend slowing down. By the end of this year, I would not be surprised if we are talking about 20,000 iPads deployed,” he said.

Android On The Rise

Bussmann is frank that he thinks Android still lags iOS for enterprise use by “about a year”.

Take the Kindle Fire, which he and his team are putting through its paces, including creating a test version of the SAP BusinessExplorer app for the Kindle Fire.

With limitations like weak support for Microsoft’s ActiveSync technology, VPNs and device encryption, the Amazon tablet is not quite “ready for the corporate environment,” he said.

At the same time, Bussmann knows that staying true to his platform heterogeneity strategy will require supporting the most popular mobile platform around. So next Monday (January 16), SAP will begin to officially deploy Android devices.

For security reasons, however, SAP plans to favor Samsung devices like the Galaxy II S and the Tab over others. That’s because Afaria has been engineered to manage Samsung devices more strongly than other Android devices. By the end of this year, Bussmann hopes that more than 1,000 Samsung Galaxy Tabs will be in use by employees.

Jumpstarting BYOD

SAP will also accelerate its Bring Your Own Device plans. SAP had started BYOD in Asia last spring, and then began allowing U.S. employees to BYOD both Apple and Android devices last September. About 500 U.S. employees are enrolled in BYOD today, their devices all managed by Afaria.

SAP’s backyard, Europe, had been trickier. The hangup is the EU’s strict data privacy laws for individuals, which made creating a BYOD policy that protected both employee and employer tricky and technically-challenging.

To address this, Sybase is enabling Afaria to support separate e-mail clients for corporate and individual e-mail. That corporate e-mail, along with other offline corporate data, will be stored in an encrypted vault to which only the company as access, Bussmann said. These and other moves will allow SAP to allow BYOD for European employees starting sometime this quarter.

Apps Go Horizontal

Many enterprise device deployments only scratch the surface, with e-mail, VPN, and a few productivity apps. SAP, naturally, has put an emphasis on having employees download apps that will deliver as much tangible ROI as possible.

Between March and December 2011, employees downloaded more than 120,000 apps, he said. SAP now has 30 mobile apps available to employees via the Afaria Mobile App Store.

SAP is moving beyond apps aimed at narrow sets of users – CRM and mobile BI for salespeople and executives, for instance – to horizontal apps that make all workers more efficient. They include the SAP NOW app, which provides relevant information customized by industry, and a Shopping Cart app for employees to approve purchase orders.

Such horizontal workflow-type apps, such as leave and vacation requests and other HR and HCM apps, will be useful for those “mobile wannabe” knowledge workers mentioned above, as they can now handle these quick-hit tasks in between meetings and during other bits of spare time, he said.

Doctors love their devices. 81% of physicians have smartphones. They also love their apps. 38% of them use medical apps daily. One-third use smartphones or tablets to access electronic medical records today, with another 20% expecting to start using them this year.

For instance, 200 doctors and nurses at Charite Berlin, one of Europe’s largest hospitals, are piloting SAP’s new Electronic Medical Record app on iPad.

The app allows medical providers to trade their clipboards for (electronic) tablets, which present them a clean dashboard that lets them drill down into data such as medical history, medications (and allergies), X-rays and vital signs. It pulls that data down from a speedy SAP Hana in-memory database.

“The future of healthcare IT is mobile. It must be able to handle very big data, must be secure, and, of course, in real time,” said Martin Peuker, CIO at Charite.

(You can watch more of Peuker’s comments from a panel at SAP TechEd Europe in November, or see a 3-minute video here.)

Or take Ottawa Hospital in Ontario, Canada. It has deployed 3,000 iPads to doctors, interns and pharmacists. One custom-built app gives providers a dashboard showing patients’ health records; another lets doctors to order lab tests, medical images or medication, according to Network World.

Here’s a nice overview of worthy mobile healthcare apps from Tab Times. Or check out publications such as iMedicalApps.com, which is written and edited by medical professionals, and MobiHealthNews, which predicts there will be 13,000 health apps aimed at consumers by this summer.

The half-empty view of the glass

At the same time, no industry appears to be deploying mobility in a more risky fashion than healthcare. Because this potentially involves your doctor, your nurse, your surgeon, your health, that’s scary.

Checking patient records, or Facebooking? Without enforced device management policies, it could be the latter.

First, many healthcare organizations appear to be careless about your data as a patient. According to a report last month from the Ponemon Institute, half of the 72 organizations surveyed don’t do anything to protect mobile devices. Only 21% lock devices down with a password, only 23% use encryption to protect data, and only 46% have any policies governing proper use of mobile devices.

That’s ironic, because I was always under the impression that healthcare organizations were very conscientious about data security due to regulations such as HIPAA.

The scarier risk is related not to your data, but to your life. “Distracted doctoring” is what the New York Times is calling the phenomenon of medical professionals using tablets or smartphones during the middle of surgery and other procedures. No, they aren’t always checking patient records or vital signs, as some/many are doing things like texting, checking airfares or stock prices.

Here’s the Times:

“You walk around the hospital, and what you see is not funny,” said Dr. Peter J. Papadakos, an anesthesiologist and director of critical care at the University of Rochester Medical Center in upstate New York, who added that he had seen nurses, doctors and other staff members glued to their phones, computers and iPads.

“You justify carrying devices around the hospital to do medical records,” he said. “But you can surf the Internet or do Facebook, and sometimes, for whatever reason, Facebook is more tempting.”

“My gut feeling is lives are in danger,” said Dr. Papadakos, who recently published an article on “electronic distraction” in Anesthesiology News, a journal. “We’re not educating people about the problem, and it’s getting worse.”

One study found that 55% of technicians who monitor heart bypass machines during surgery had talked on their cellphones during the surgery. A similar percentage of technicians admitted to texting during surgery.

Here’s a frightening anecdote:

Scott J. Eldredge, a medical malpractice lawyer in Denver, recently represented a patient who was left partly paralyzed after surgery. The neurosurgeon was distracted during the operation, using a wireless headset to talk on his cellphone, Mr. Eldredge said.

“He was making personal calls,” Mr. Eldredge said, at least 10 of them to family and business associates, according to phone records. His client’s case was settled before a lawsuit was filed so there are no court records, like the name of the patient, doctor or hospital involved. Mr. Eldredge, citing the agreement, declined to provide further details.

And here’s still-another anecdote reported by the Times earlier this week that quotes a federal report written by the CIO at Harvard Medical School, John Halamka, about medical multi-tasking that went wrong for a 56-year-old man with dementia who needed the feeding tube into his stomach removed:

Before the feeding-tube procedure, the doctors increased the patient’s dose of anticoagulation medicine to reduce his risk of stroke. After the procedure, the doctors held a meeting about the case. They decided the patient needed an echocardiogram, a heart image, to determine whether to continue the blood-thinning medication.

During the meeting, the attending doctor instructed the medical resident (a junior doctor) to order the anticoagulation treatment temporarily stopped. The resident began to enter that order into her phone using a computerized doctor order entry system. These are increasingly common systems that can be used on phones or tablets.

Before the resident could finish the order, her phone beeped with an incoming text. It was from a friend. She got lost in the text and failed to finish the order. The patient continued to get the blood thinner at the elevated dose he was getting before the feeding-tube procedure.

On the patient’s fourth day in the hospital, his heart raced and he was gulping for air. He was rushed into emergency open-heart surgery. Blood had filled the sack around the heart. He’d received too much blood thinner, but he survived.

Obviously, I’m all for medical institutions deploying mobile devices. They have huge potential in helping medical providers diagnose patients more quickly and accurately, improving the patient-provider relationship, and reducing extra paperwork – and the medical errors that are sometimes caused by them.

But I wonder if hospitals need to draft up an industry-wide set of best practices governing the use of mobile devices in hospital settings (lest the federal government steps in, and nobody wants that). So no personal apps or incoming phones and texts inside certain locations of a hospital, or during shift hours. Or even the outright blacklisting of non-work web sites, apps and data from these devices.

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) might seem to be a non-starter in the healthcare industry, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. All of the above policies can be enforced using Mobile Device Management (MDM) software. Just make sure to choose an MDM software that offers very fine-tuned and granular control over your devices, says Tom Maxwell, COO of Homecare Homebase LLC, a Dallas, Texas provider of software for the home health industry.

Homecare’s self-named app runs on Android tablets such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab. It is used by nurses that go and make house call visits to check on elderly or otherwise immobile patients.

Rather than relying on Android to secure its patient data, Homecare built its app to have its own password, its own authentication scheme for users trying to download data from the server, and its own 1024-bit encryption for data that is stored on the tablet, said Maxwell.

The Homecare app also synchronizes wirelessly with the server throughout the day so that all patient data downloaded from the server along with the data typed in by the nurse during a visit is sent back to the server or simply deleted from the tablet after the visit is done. Such policies can be enforced by MDM software, true. But it would be great if other healthcare app vendors emulate Homecare and make such security and compliance features standard.

For instance, I remember being in Japan a decade ago and first seeing the macho macho chewing gum called Black Black.

Black Black is not only caffeinated like Red Bull, but it’s also peppermint-y. Aggressively, tongue-stabbingly so. Because the way to hint to the ladies that you have Abs of Steel hiding under that dress shirt is by chewing Black Black and showing you have a Kevlar Stomach.

The Chuck Norris of gums, Black Black likes to give bad breath a roundhouse kick to the face.

(Never mind that Black Black also includes sissy-ish ingredients such as chrysanthemum flower extract and coloring from gardenia flowers.)

Anyway, I thought we were far far away from hitting that level of commoditization in the tablet market. I mean, there are very salient technical, usability and platform differences that separate the various tablets out there. Like screen size. Number of CPU cores. Operating system. Apps. Etc.

But one Indian manufacturer is convinced we’ve gotten that point, or it is just very very desperate.

Milagrow is the self-proclaimed maker of the first TabTop(TM) PC. Take away the jargon, and you find that it’s merely a $500 8-inch Android tablet that comes pre-loaded with about 50 apps.

The New Dehli-based company’s first product wasn’t particularly well-received. A reviewer for India’s IBN magazine called the first TabTop “ugly, overpriced” and says that it has “numerous flaws…misses grace and looks cheap.” He recommended that buyers get an iPad or Samsung Galaxy Tab for the same price instead.

Undaunted, Milagrow today began touting the “world’s only TabTop PC for women professionals.” It is the same tablet, except that this tablet is a little bit lighter and is half the price (about $250).

Because, you know, men love it when their portable gadgets are heavier and cost twice as much.

Actually, the arguably most feminine thing about the Milagrow tablets is that they come in pink and baby blue.

Making gadgets in a rainbow of Lifesaver candy colors was a winning strategy for Apple with its original iMac G3s. The thing was as cute as the iMac G3s were, Apple never dared say that these iMacs were aimed at women. That would’ve seemed patronizing and also shut out half of the potential market.

Also, Milagrow sorta undercut the whole female tablet angle by making two of the colors grey and black. I don’t know about you, but I know a few tech gadgets bought by men that come in those colors.

It’s impossible to judge the new TabTop PC’s usability (it runs Android 2.3 Honeycomb). But if, as appears, it only has a single-core 1.2 GHz ARM processor, then a $250 doesn’t seem like super-great value, when you have RIM selling 64 GB dual-core PlayBooks for $300.

It sounds like these won’t be coming state-side, but oh, if only these would only show up at my local Fry’s Electronics store, I could have more fun making fun of them.

***********

The Mobility Manifesto book that I edited is now available as an iBook for comfortable reading on your iPhone or iPad. Download it here.

Or visit the Web site and see where you rank on the Mobility Matrix and/or ask for a print copy.

Not all of my predictions for 2011 were awful. I suggested that Microsoft would unify its PC-tablet roadmap with Windows 8, though it would take several years.

I was talking up Bring Your Own Device 20 months ago, when BYOD was not yet a hot thing, much less a widely-used acronym. And I argued that with mobile devices, it’s Management, not (Protection from) Malware, that matters.

Still, this column is me donning a virtual hairshirt, as I own up to all of my wrong trendspotting for the soon-to-end year.

Bad Prediction #1: Superphones would finally become a thing in 2011. As the name of a new category of phones succeeding ‘smartphone’, SuperPhone has everything going for it. It sounds awesome, heroic even, like it was created by some writer at DC or Marvel Comics.

Going by the rule of threes, I figured that the smartphone market had gotten mature enough that it would split into 3 tiers: SuperPhones on top (read my definition of their specs here), smartphones in the middle, and featurephones for the mass consumer at the bottom.

I think there were several reasons why I was wrong:

- Generally, the tech industry creates new jargon faster than a teenage girl changes her clothes. But it also hates to interrupt a hot streak by confusing consumers. And smartphones were definitely on a hot streak in 2011, growing by leaps and bounds. Why risk confusing customers by pushing a new, vague category?

- SuperPhones were hard to categorize because they didn’t really look all that different from smartphones. They weren’t particularly thicker or larger-screened, nor did they all come with keyboards. Peoples’ hands and pocket sizes aren’t increasing; wearing a phone clipped to your belt was no more fashionable in 2011 than it was in past years. So there was no way SuperPhones were going to become a category, unless we all became as tall as basketball players or if fanny packs become fashionable again. Wait a tic…

- SuperPhone was a term only embraced by the Android camp, and only a few manufacturers at that. Apple was careful never to use the term. That hurt, considering most consumers, if asked what phone models they can name, unprompted, can probably only name the iPhone.

According to Google News, there were just under 400 articles using the term SuperPhone, compared to 110,000 using smartphone. Will SuperPhones finally catch in 2012? I’m not betting on it.

Bad Prediction #2: Adobe Flash would become relevant on mobile. As Apple zigged away from Flash, I figured that the rest of the industry, especially the Android camp, would zag towards Flash. That happened initially – both Samsung and RIM made a big deal out of the fact that the Galaxy Tab and PlayBook were Flash-compatible.

But users never really seemed to care all that much. There was a plethora of non-Flash content for them, including, crucially, YouTube videos. Developers moved to other platforms. By November, Adobe decided to cut its losses by effectively ending Flash for mobile.

Bad Prediction #3: The market would naturally come around on the BlackBerry PlayBook. After the negative reviews of the PlayBook at its release in April and the predictions of doom for RIM, I railed against the “premature prognostication for the sake of being first.”

I took the contrarian stance that what was once overrated had now become underrated, and implied basically that I believed that PlayBook sales would surprise everyone over the next six months.

After all, RIM ships 15-million+ BlackBerry phones overseas every quarter without any U.S.-based pundit seeming to realize it.

Well, I was surprised – just by how much RIM apparently over-ordered and how many PlayBooks sat on retailers’ shelves. And when Amazon shipped the Kindle Fire that was oh, 90-95% identical to the Playbook, but only $199, RIM had to react by cutting the Playbook’s price 60%.

While that may look like a desperation move, I think it will have the desired result of getting 1-2 million Playbooks into customers’ hands by early 2012. That will bring the developers and then start the whole virtuous cycle of apps-attracting-customers-attracting-developers-attracting-customers, etc. Already, there are already 4,200 apps for the Playbook.

When Android compatibility comes in the spring, that number effectively grows by a factor of 90 or so. In other words, I don’t think I’m outright wrong on the PlayBook as I was with Flash; I just haven’t been proven right, yet.

Bad Prediction #4: The rise of low-cost ‘FeatureTablets.’ Just as inexpensive, low-powered featurephones vastly outsell smartphones worldwide, I figured that featuretablets from no-name brands like Coby running Android would become huge with consumers. These would be sub-$200 tablets that would sport single-core ARM chips, poor battery life, few apps and bad touchscreens. These would be the cheapie devices that Best Buy or Frys would advertise as doorbusters to get people in the door before trying to upsell them to iPads or Galaxy Tabs.

Then came Amazon with its $199 Kindle Fire, This is a state-of-the-art dual-core device with a large selection of content. By bringing a mid-range tablet at a low-end, below-cost price, Amazon has guaranteed that it will sell boatloads of Kindle Fires and make it almost impossible for anyone else to undercut them. I mean, there will be tablets at $100 price points, but I doubt if they will ever form the bulk of the market as cellphones/featurephones still do. At least not in the developed world.

Bad Prediction #5: Android app downloads would grow exponentially. In July, I created a chart taking historical app download data from Apple and Google and tried to extrapolate growth trends based on that. Based mostly on exponential growth for the last two quarters, I boldly predicted that Android app downloads would blow past iOS by the end of this year.

In retrospect, it’s obvious to see that I was too optimistic. Google hasn’t given a count in the last several weeks, but according to AndroLib’s real-time counter, 7.2 billion Android apps had been downloaded by December 29 – far lower (and more reasonable) than the 40 billion I thought was possible.

However, my App Store projection, based wholly from Cupertino-announced data, appears nearly spot-on. Apple’s App Store is likely to get 10 billion downloads in 2011, leading to a cumulative end of 2011 total of 20 billion downloaded apps. That’s pretty close to the 23.7 billion downloads I predicted for the end of January 2012.

I still think it’s likely that Android app downloads will overtake App Store downloads. There are just too many devices out there now. Will it happen in 2012? Perhaps.

Also called the “Above Average Effect,” it’s generally considered by psychologists to be a healthy thing for people to believe in.*

The great thing about surveys is that they demonstrate in brutally honest, mathematical fashion that no, we are not all above average.

Take the Mobility Matrix, for example. This is a short survey that we created at Sybase that asks quiztakers how their companies use smartphones, tablets and mobile apps at work.

Respondents are scored on two dimensions – their company’s Mobile Savviness and their Mobile Culture – and then placed in one of four Quadrants: Laggard, Dreamer, Rookie or Leader.

Of the nearly 4,000 people that have visited www.MobilityManifesto.com since it was launched 3 weeks ago, more than 300 have taken the survey to see Where They Rank on Mobility.

By removing the factor of Illusory Superiority, the results are not pretty. 54% of respondents work at companies that are Laggards on Mobility today. That means they may either lack many devices inside their organization or don’t take advantage of the ones that are being carried by their workers.

Another 22% are Dreamers, meaning that they might have started planning their long-term mobile strategy, but still haven’t taken forward steps such as secure their devices or roll out apps beyond simple productivity ones.

Another 8% of companies, according to the Matrix, are Rookies, meaning they might have taken shallow steps such as enable a Bring Your Own Device strategy, but haven’t done much strategic, long-range planning.

Only 15% are Leaders, meaning that they both talk the talk and walk the walk around mobility. Expect those companies to start leapfrogging their competitors as they reap the ROI from their mobile investments.

Below are a bunch of slides from the keynote presentation by Sybase Executive Vice-President and head of SAP Mobile Applications, Dr. Raj Nathan, along with some of his quotes, my commentary, and reaction from the 200 or so analysts and journalists tweeting from the event (#SAPSummit) in Boston.

Slide decks for other presentations by co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe, SAP Executive Board member in charge of technology and innovation, Vishal Sikka and President of Solutions Go-to-Market, Sanjay Poonen, and other videos from breakout sessions later today and Wednesday are available at the SAP Virtual Summit page.

(Click on the slides to open larger in a new window, and then right-click to save to your computer.)

As I hinted in my preview blog to the Summit, SAP had some ambitious internal goals to meet this year. There was some momentum at my employer Sybase, but there was no guarantee that the integration wouldn’t make things grind to an ugly halt.

Well, SAP has met its goal of bringing out 30+ line-of-business mobile apps.

And SAP has performed on the sales side, too: 350+ new customers, 17.5 million total end user seats sold. Visit the latest Enterprise Mobility newsletter from Sybase to view links to the customer videos below – Tommy Hilfiger, Boston Scientific, Charite Berlin, CSC, Simba Dickie, Tasnee and more.

(I realize that seats sold does not equal active workers deployed and using today, as my headline above implies. Which is why I clarify it now.)

SAP/Sybase are, according to Nathan, responding to the mobility trends above, including the need to manage the entire lifecycle of both consumer and enterprise apps, improve the user interface of apps, and accomodate and woo developers who want to use HTML5 technology, and more.

Basically, enterprises want their mobile device management (MDM) software to do more. Strong security is already becoming commoditized in the iOS arena. The only forward for non-platform vendors is to augment with the features above, says Nathan.

For SAP and Sybase, this means bringing Afaria and Sybase Unwired Platform ever closer together, until they become a truly unified platform. It also means adding the ability to manage non-enterprise apps and letting enterprise developers build lightweight Web apps ever faster. At that point, what you have is a greater platform that does what some are calling Enterprise Mobility Management.

Raj also talked up the new SAP Store for Mobile Apps and the roadmap above. Read this for more slides and an interview with Usman Sheikh, the vice-president at SAP Ecohub in charge of the new SAP Store for Mobile Apps.

When SAP bought Sybase in May 2010 for $5.8 billion, there were plenty of doubters. Some of that was based on misinformation – that Sybase was still only a database company, not, as in reality, a leader in multiple emerging markets including enterprise mobility, analytics and mobile commerce – held by those who really should’ve known better.

But there was also legitimate doubt about the “force multiplier” effect promised by co-CEO Bill McDermott from taking Sybase’s software to SAP’s massive customer and partner ecosystem.

[To keep up with what's happening inside the SAP mobile ecosystem, check out the December edition of the Sybase Enterprise Mobility newsletter.]

Keynote speakers at this year’s event include co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe, CTO Vishal Sikka, Sybase executive vice-president and head of SAP mobile app development, Dr. Raj Nathan and Global Solutions president, Sanjay Poonen.

Held in Boston, the event begins Tuesday Dec. 13 at 8 am Eastern Time and runs til the end of business on Wednesday, Dec. 14.

You can keep up with all of the news in real-time by following me on Twitter @ericylai tomorrow morning, or tracking the Twitter hashtag #SAPsummit, or watching the tweets and blogs as they roll in at the SAP Newsroom.

Morr’s comment was pithy: “In short, the intern got it wrong.”

I agree that is the basic gist of Hackborn’s post, though of course her technical explanation makes it clear that reality is in shades of grey rather than black and white.

I’ll try to boil her post down into ten statements without hopefully losing all of the nuance.

1) On accusations that Android doesn’t prioritize key threads such as UI rendering, “this is outright wrong.”

2) Android lets app and screen rendering be prioritized as default or background. User interface threads normally run at the main default. Application processes running in the background are forced to run in the background.

3) Background threads are bunched together using a “Linux facility called cgroups.” Collectively, these threads are only allowed to take up 10% CPU utilization maximum.

4) There was a ‘foreground’ priority thread in the original Android but it was abandoned b/c it turned out not to smooth UI rendering all that much.

5) Android uses the two sets of priority threads as part of its goal of creating a ‘sandbox’ architecture that separates all apps, incl. 3rd-party ones, for security reasons. This, says Hackborn, differs from iOS’s design which didn’t originally accommodate 3rd-party apps.

6) It is true that there is not a separate real-time thread just for screen rendering, as in iOS. However, this is no magic bullet.

7) Rather, setting up a separate thread just for drawing the UI in real-time would not have been worth it, due to a bunch of complex reasons I don’t quite understand, though Hackborn seems to be hinting it is related to Android’s overall open app architecture.

8) Android only “recently” began to use hardware acceleration for drawing inside the UI. That’s because hardware acceleration isn’t as simple as making your graphics chip handle the UI. It takes a lot of memory and multiple processes to manage the graphics chips as “most mobile GPUs still have fairly expensive GL context switching.”

9) “There are of course many things that can be improved in Android today, just as there are many things that have been improved since 1.0. As other more pressing issues are addressed, and hardware capabilities improve and change, we continue to push the platform forward and make it better.”

10) But it’s no technical piece of cake to enable iOS to touch-scroll at a smooth 60 frames per second, either. Hackborn quotes a comment to that effect from an outside developer. “Based on this statement I don’t see any indication that there is something intrinsically flawed about Android in making lists scroll at 60fps, any more than there is in iOS.”

So what’s your takeaway? The key of course is how you weigh Hackborn’s admission that no, there is no real-time thread dedicated specifically to UI rendering, but yes, there are clear ways to strongly prioritize UI rendering over potentially-interfering background tasks.

Also, as I point out in my post, “Why I still have faith in Ice Cream Sandwich overcoming Android’s Fundamental Lagginess,” this may all be simply the equivalent of an arcane philosophical argument in an advanced college seminar, except between two software engineers.

The real-world evidence shows that the new Ice Cream Sandwich update DOES appear to cut the herky-jerky behavior of Android, vis-a-vis the glowing reviews for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone running Ice Cream Sandwich, and the less-glowing reviews for the ostensibly more-powerful (4 cores!) Asus eee Transformer Prime running the existing Honeycomb version.

What’s your view, or your real-world experience with ICS and screen lagginess?

Before I go on, here’s the backstory for those of you who didn’t see the dueling Google+ blog posts that appeared earlier this week between Android engineer Dianne Hackborn and ex-Android-future-Windows-Phone intern, Andrew Munn on the subject of Android’s laggy rendering compared to iOS, Windows Phone 7, and other modern smartphone OSes.

(Also! After I posted this blog, Hackborn responded with a strong rebuttal of Munn’s assertions. See my summary here.)

Now, I had always assumed that sluggishness in Android was symptomatic of quality issues that are the inevitable result of Google’s open ecosystem strategy: 1) until Google’s acquisition of Motorola, its inability to optimize hardware with OS since they are built by different companies (unlike the iPhone or iPad); 2) the lower bar for entry for apps into the Android market that results in more potentially buggy apps.

Then I heard about Ice Cream Sandwich (hereafter known as ICS), and how features such as hardware acceleration (the ability to let the GPU more efficiently do the rendering work) would supposedly smooth out Android’s stuttering UI.

In that context, Hackborn’s post was curious. Rather than confirming that ICS’ hardware acceleration will improve Android’s touchscreen response, she focused on correcting “technical misinformation” and explain that earlier versions of Android, including the version 2.2 Gingerbread installed on most phones today, actually already use some hardware acceleration.

With its latest update, has Android fixed its nagging screen lag problem? Early evidence strongly suggests ‘Yes.’

Being an engineer, it’s not in Hackborn’s DNA to be market-y or even humblebrag. Which is admirable, but it left the uneasy impression that rendering lag would continue to be a huge problem.

That’s exactly what Munn argues. Citing several online sources plus ex-colleagues at Android, the 3rd-year engineering student explains that Android’s lagginess is fundamental to its architecture. Basically, Android was originally designed to be used on regular laptops with a keyboard and a mouse. It doesn’t prioritize real-time tasks like screen rendering with a separate, protected thread. As a result, the UI can’t handle constant input and screen redraws, as fingers on a touchscreen tend to create.

This is the main reason why Android isn’t and can never be as smooth as iOS or Windows Phone 7, which do prioritize real-time rendering, says Munn. Only a fundamental rewrite, the kind that would break hundreds of thousand of existing Android apps, will fix this nagging issue, he warns. Otherwise, “Android UI will never be completely smooth.”

Munn is a great writer, and combined with his ostensible insider knowledge and his no-BS truthtelling stance, he makes a compelling argument.

The fact that neither Hackborn nor anyone else at Google has responded to Munn after two days is also telling.

But let’s put this into perspective:

- Munn worked on Android full-time as a college intern for all of 3 months.

- He admits that he was neither on the Android framework team responsible for UI rendering, nor has he even “read any Android rendering source code.”

I am going to go out on a limb and say that Munn probably — hear me out — actually maybe, may in fact, not be the supreme authority on Android rendering that we’d all wish him to be.

Also, here’s the thing. After reading Munn’s post, I decided to see what the real-world evidence, not just the theory, says.

I found all of the reviews I could for the only phone running Ice Cream Sandwich today – that would be the Samsung Galaxy Nexus – to see if the UI was indeed smoother than before. Below are excerpts from reviews that explicitly commented on the UI:

Engadget: “The Galaxy Nexus is definitely one of the fastest Android handsets we’ve ever played with. Everything feels snappy, everything looks fluid — Ice Cream Sandwich isn’t just a new version of Google’s mobile OS, it’s what happens when Android hits the gym and becomes lean and mean.”

Boy Genius Report: “Android 4.0 is fast. Extremely fast. Scrolling between the five home screens (please, please let me customize the number of home screens) was silky smooth with practically no lag whatsoever.”

GigaOM: “Android 4.0.1 on the Galaxy Nexus feels like it actually borrows more from Windows Phone 7.5 than iOS, at least in terms of aesthetics, and everything in general seems to work better and smoother.”

The Verge: “As far as phone performance is concerned, however, the Galaxy Nexus feels blazingly, stupidly fast to me. Touch response is excellent on the phone — everything reacts quickly to your movements. Homescreen scrolling was snappy, moving into and out of apps was instantaneous, swiping through long lists was stutter free, and web browsing (even on heavy pages like ours) was super speedy. ..It’s obviously a combination of great hardware and great software, but the Nexus is probably the tightest feeling, snappiest Android phone I’ve ever used. It’s awesome.”

Gizmodo: ” The user experience is extremely fast and fluid. Scrolling around webpages is quicker and smoother than any other mobile browser I’ve used (and with all of its new enhanced features, I would call ICS’ version of Chrome the best mobile browser out there).”

PhoneArena: “Using an Android phone has never looked or felt better…It just flies no matter if you’re swiping through homescreen, scrolling long lists, webpages, or opening and closing heavy applications. The occasions where we noticed a slight slowdown (like when switching to landscape QWERTY) were so few, that we’d go as far as to say that the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is one of the fastest smartphones out there today.”

SlashGear: “Although the TI dual-core is capable of 1.2GHz in the Galaxy Nexus (the chip itself is offered at up to 1.5GHz in other devices) during our testing it spent less than 5-percent of its time at that speed. In fact, over 85-percent of the time the CPU was running at just 350MHz, with the remainder somewhere around the 700-850MHz point. That aggressive throttling – and the fact that the phone never felt slow – is testament to Ice Cream Sandwich’s frugality and refinement.”

Laptop magazine: “Very fast performance: On our tests, the Galaxy Nexus was super smooth and responsive. Featuring a 1.2-GHz dual-core processor, the phone instantly launched the App menu and let us jump between apps (such as the browser and “Fruit Ninja”) in a second. The Galaxy Nexus also delivered excellent graphics performance when we played “Riptide GP.” The action never stuttered, and we could make out detailed reflections in the rippling water.”

Mashable: “All that hardware is brought to bear on the centerpiece of this new phone, the first smartphone shipping with Google’s Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” (ICS) operating system. It represents a giant leap in usability for this popular operating system. The first thing I noticed was its ability to smoothly scroll down long lists, the complaint I’ve had against Android-packing phones from the beginning. Finally, you can scroll up and down a Google+ stream and slide down lists of emails with smoother response, although not all apps I tried enjoy that butter-smooth scrolling yet.”

That’s nine reviews saying ICS on Nexus is butter-smooth. Meanwhile, I found only 3 reviews that mentioned a hiccup-y UI:

CNET: “Though we were hoping that it would be different, the Galaxy Nexus still has that slight laggy effect that we’ve seen on other Android phones. Indeed, you’ll notice it here when scrolling through lists. It is better than we’ve seen on previous models, so it doesn’t ruin the touch interface, but you do notice the difference when switching from an iOS or Windows Phone 7 device”

TechCrunch: “Usually the Galaxy Nexus hums along, but I’ve had one or two moments where where it reminded me of my Nexus One, pausing at odd moments and apparently ignoring finger taps. This hasn’t happened often — and Google says at least one of the issues I saw is a known bug that has already been fixed on devices customers will receive. So we’ll see how it performs over the coming weeks.”

Time magazine: “For the most part, the Galaxy Nexus’s 1.2-GHz dual-core processor makes for a fluid experience, but I did encounter some instances when the phone briefly ignored my taps and swipes–a usability glitch that’s pretty much unknown in the Apple world.“

The evidence would say no. Six reviews mentioned the laggy UI, one review was neutral, and one said the problem had gone away.

CNET: “While the Prime’s IPS screen was immediately clear and sharp when first we powered it on, it was the screen transitions that really impressed us. The first time we tapped the Apps button, we were treated to a noticeably higher frame rate transition than on any previous Android tablet. We hoped this fluidity would carry over to apps like Marvel Comics, but that was not the case. Reading a comic through the app on the iPad 2 is still a considerably smoother experience, but this may have something to do with specific optimizations of the iPad app. We can’t be sure, however.”

Laptop: “As with every other Android tablet we’ve used, we noticed occasional moments of slowness in opening a menu or launching an app, but there were fewer of those moments than on other devices.”

The Verge: “While Nvidia says the general UI and OS should feel faster, I have only found that to be the case some of the time. While you can see in the video that swipes across homescreens are swifter, the waiting that frequently occurs when opening menus or toggling between apps on Honeycomb tablets isn’t completely gone.“

Engadget: “That said, we were sorry to still see some occasional stutters and hiccups from time to time, instances where the device would hesitate for just a half-second or so before responding. There are three performance modes that are easily selected between in the pop-up settings menu, but even on its highest we couldn’t get it to be a consistently smooth operator. They’re the kind of stops and starts we’ve seen on just about every Android device to date and it’s a bit of a shame that even four whopping cores running at 1.3GHz can’t do away with them.”

PC Magazine: “You won’t see the blinding speed when you’re poking around the main UI or some of Google’s apps, as they’re occasionally nonresponsive, although screen transitions are a bit more fluid than on other Android tablets.”

SlashGear: “What you’ll find here is that the two tests we’ve got running here, the Prime outdoes the original Transformer by quite a bit, but the iPad 2 still leaves both of the Android tablets [Transformer and Transformer Prime] in the dust.”

PCWorld: “ Beyond the obvious boost in CPU performance and gaming, the benefits of the quad-core Tegra 3 wasn’t apparent in all activities. Touchscreen swiping was smoother, for example, but in general, navigation, multitasking, and in-app experiences didn’t feel dramatically faster.“

GigaOM: “The ASUS Transformer Prime tablet, powered by Nvidia’s quad-core Tegra 3 chip, seems to be running silky-smooth in this first look.”

So to recap, Doctor of Science style:

Hypothesis: Even if handicapped by a lack of real-time rendering thread, Android’s screen lag can be reduced to the point that, for all intents and purposes, it matches iOS or Windows Phone 7 in perceived smoothness.

Experiment 1: Does ICS on Galaxy Nexus run smoothly?

Result: Yes, by an overwhelming 9:3 margin, according to professional reviewers.

Experiment 2: Does the more-powerful hardware of the Asus Transformer Prime overcome the stuttering Honeycomb UI?

Result: No, by an even more overwhelming 6.5:1.5 margin.

Conclusion: Throwing faster processors at Android isn’t what solves its stuttering problem; its improvements in ICS. Improvements that appear to have banished the lag problem, even without having apparently rewritten its rendering engine, as Munn argued must be done.

With more than 85% of Android users on either Froyo or Gingerbread, this would be great news and potentially the end of their most nagging, annoying issue.

Here’s the list of devices and when they’ll be eligible for official installs of ICS. They include virtually all dual-core devices released by HTC, Acer, Asus, LG, Motorola, Samsung and Sony this year.

I’m eager to see if ICS does indeed improve screen lag on those devices, too. That would be definitive proof of my theory that even if it’s not the most elegant solution, Google’s engineers are doing enough workarounds to the real-time threading issue so that it won’t matter anymore.

———–

A quick plug: I’ll be covering the Mobility portion of the next Tuesday’s SAP Influencer Summit. Basically, my parent company will trot out top executives to speak to top market analysts about next year’s strategy and roadmap. If you’re interested in what we’re doing in enterprise mobile apps, development and management, follow me on Twitter at @ericylai on Dec. 13 starting 6 am PST or watch the hashtag #SAPsummit.

You may chuckle. Indeed, when Randy Nunez, a senior network engineer for Ford, shared this anecdote during his excellent presentation last week at IDC’s mobileNext Forum in San Francisco, it drew a laugh from the audience.

But when Nunez received that fateful e-mail from his CIO asking to investigate BYOD, Microsoft was the chief alternative to BlackBerries. iPhones were only several months old at the time, while Android was not yet announced.

The moral? Deploying mobile devices in a large company is “a little like painting the Golden Gate Bridge,” he said. By the time you think you’re done, the environment has changed and “you have to start all over again.”

There were many great presentations by enterprises at mobileNext, many of them touching on BYOD.

(To read about how 3/4 of enterprises today have BYOD policies, click here. Or what to do after you’ve instituted BYOD, read here.)

But Nunez’s talk about Ford’s experience stood out for its frankness as well as its wise insights.

Ford’s motivation to look into BYOD as a reaction to two trends: Consumerization of IT, as well as the new habits of 20-something Millennial employees.

To re-emphasize how forward-looking Ford really was in 2007, a quick search of Google News shows zero stories about BYOD, at least related to mobile devices (there were stories about Bring Your Own Dog and Borrow Your Own Dancer, but I digress).

Ford’s Randy Nunez: Deploying BYOD in a huge company like Ford is a bit like “painting the Golden Gate Bridge.”

To investigate BYOD, Ford created a cross-functional team consisting of managers from the IT, legal, HR, accounting and other departments.

“We tried to quantify the risk versus the reward,” Nunez said. Naturally, each member of the group brought their own concerns about security, laws and user support. Combine that with the fact that there was no hard and set deadline, and the BYOD task force couldn’t agree on the way forward.

So it created a report outlining the benefits, risks and costs, and sent it to senior management, to make a ruling.

That not only broke the deadlock, says Nunez, but also got strong buy-in from the executives. With that, Ford moved forward in the second quarter of 2009 – exactly two years later – on a program it calls eMail on Personally Owned Devices, or ePOD.

ePOD is not the most cutting-edge BYOD program around. Workers who are accepted into ePOD are only allowed to check their Ford e-mail, as well as their personal calendars, contacts and task lists from their personally-owned devices, on or off Ford campus.

“This is for the casual user, not for someone for whom mobility is critical for their job,” said Nunez. Also, ePOD users need to be tech-savvy, as Ford doesn’t provide any technical support. Calls to Ford’s help desk about ePOD are referred to a Web site where employees offer each other technical support.

ePOD is more about employee convenience than about saving them money. Employees pay for the cost of the device and all subscription fees. Ford only bears back-end costs such as servers or software licenses.

For Ford, these limitations were the result of the financial reality it and other American automakers were facing several years ago.

“It was a cost-effective way of getting into the game,” Nunez said.

ePOD has still proven popular with Ford employees. Ford has 2,700 employees in the BYOD program. 800 use BlackBerries (there are another 3,000 employees who use BlackBerries that are owned and paid for by Ford).

While BlackBerry support debuted in 2009, Apple support began a year later, in September 2010. Today, 1,900 employees use iPads, iPhones and iPod Touches. These devices are secured using Mobile Device Management (MDM) software.

Nunez says the BYOD program has been considered a success at Ford. Executive support has been key, he says, as has the narrow scope of the BYOD program, which has resulted in a low TCO.

“We didn’t give the keys to the kingdom away,” he said.

What is in the future for Ford’s BYOD program? Ford plans to begin supporting Android devices this month. That rollout was slowed due to concerns over Android security, he acknowledged. Deployments of apps remain in limbo, he said, partly because the company wants to make sure it can secure the apps as well as have sufficient network connectivity on campus to support that heavier load.

Ford’s recent financial success also has the company weighing whether to offer employee stipends as reimbursement for their personal devices, Nunez said.
———–

A quick plug: I’ll be covering the Mobility portion of the next Tuesday’s SAP Influencer Summit. Basically, my parent company will trot out top executives to speak to top market analysts about next year’s strategy and roadmap. If you’re interested in what we’re doing in enterprise mobile apps, development and management, follow me on Twitter at @ericylai on Dec. 13 starting 6 am PST or watch the hashtag #SAPsummit.

So I hope I’m not opening a can of worms by suggesting that IT could learn something from their developer pals.

In the past decade, many developers have embraced the Agile style of development. Done right, teams of Agile (also known as Scrum, Extreme, Lean, and a myriad of other names) developers work together better, write simpler, better code, and release new versions faster than through traditional styles of development such as Waterfall.

Agile’s ‘Release Early, Release Often’ mantra harmonizes perfectly with Web 2.0 and mobile apps, though it can also accelerate and ease development of large applications, too.

Agile’s other tenets – flexibility, bottom-up collaboration, people over process – can also help IT managers wrestling with how to manage mobility. Why? And, how? Let me explain.

1) Hardware lifecycles are shorter. Old-school IT departments are used to decade-old Unix servers or laptops that you hold onto for 4-5 years. They’ll be shocked to find that with smartphones and tablets, a 2-year lifecycle is typical, and 3 years probably the utter maximum.

That’s not because mobile devices necessarily break faster. Devices that are equipped with consumer-grade protective cases can last just as long as ruggedized ones if employees are motivated.

Rather, innovation is faster. It took several years for PCs to go from single-core to quad-core. But just within this year, we went from a single-core iPad to the quad-core Asus EEE Pad Transformer Prime.

2) Platforms rise, fall and change more quickly, too. As Sybase CTO Irfan Khan pointed out recently, Android wasn’t even around 4 years ago. Now it’s tops in smartphones. Meanwhile, it took almost a decade before Windows XP was finally, recently displaced by something else.

Or take this comment by a speaker at the IDC MobileNext Forum. His organization, a large car manufacturer, started planning a Bring Your Own Device policy back in the middle of 2007. The platforms they figured they would need to support included Windows Mobile, Symbian and Palm. By the middle of 2009 when they actually launched the BYOD program, those 3 platforms had been whittled down to just one: the iPhone.

The speaker’s comments drew muffled laughter from the audience. They weren’t laughing AT the speaker, though. They were laughing at themselves, perhaps remembering once-beloved WinMo and Treo devices that they hadn’t thought of in what seems like forever, despite it being just several years.

Now, it’s possible that the market will eventually shake out and settle onto a few platforms. And that improved Mobile Device Management software will make the process of updating and patching OSes much more seamless and easy than it is today. But until that day comes, IT managers need to be able to react to changing hardware and platforms, and be able to deploy them more quickly.

So out would be companies like Federal Express, which took a year last time to roll out a ruggedized mobile device. Granted, that was to deploy and train 100,000 not-very-technical workers worldwide. And that that ruggedized device is so expensive that FedEx hopes to keep it around for six years.

An example more in-line with contemporary trends would be my parent company, SAP, which rolled out 3,000 iPads to its salespeople in just 6 weeks using Sybase Afaria MDM software.

3) Workers have much more say today. The Consumerization of IT trend brought BYOD to enterprises. BYOD is only the most visible example of how the balance of power has shifted away from IT departments. Command-and-control is out; partnerships with the business side are in.

That’s analogous to Agile’s emphasis on bottom-up, organic collaboration and privileging people and relationships over rules and processes.

A nice example of this attitude would be Rick Peltz, CIO at real-estate brokerage, Marcus & Millichap.

“The real estate brokers are my clients. I like to hang out with the guys in the industry. And I will put my job on the line, if I believe in something,” he told the audience at IDC’s mobileNext.

As a result of listening to the brokers, Peltz went ahead and asked AT&T to build an iOS and Android mobile app for them. The app hosts profiles of Marcus’ 1,200 agents, and enables property buyers/customers viewing those profiles or property listings to immediately text, e-mail or call one of Marcus’ agents.

And, mind you, Peltz went ahead and had this built without any explicit request from business-side executives, and purely out of his own budget.

Peltz is so focused on his end-users – the agents – that he is even being Bcc:ed on every e-mail inquiry sent to the brokers, just so that he can better understand their needs.

Or take the recently-published Mobility Manifesto (from Sybase), and its ‘Universal Declaration of Workers’ Mobile Rights.’

Both of these examples parallel Agile Programming’s emphasis on bottom-up, organic collaboration over formal, inflexible, top-down planning. And all of these can serve as useful role models for progressive IT departments wondering how best to structure themselves in the post-PC era.

I once proposed that a formula for determining user satisfaction for a tablet would look something like this:

(Hardware Sexiness + User Interface + Apps) / (Upfront Price + Long-term Cost (i.e. subscriptions)) = Overall Satisfaction

The PlayBook is a nice, fast piece of hardware with a slick UI.

But its $499 price was too high. And the app selection for the PlayBook’s QNX OS remains slim: about 1,600, as of late November 2011.

(According to a PlayBook user Peter Hansen, PlayBook users who search App World from within their device will actually discover more than 4,200 apps.)

One of those had to change for RIM to change the equation. Obviously, cutting the price was faster.

RIM is definitely losing money with each PlayBook. Amazon probably loses about $3 for every $199 Kindle Fire it sells. The PlayBook is identical to the Kindle Fire, except that it has more storage, a camera and nicer casing. And many PlayBooks were manufactured and shipped to stores even before the Fire was announced. So let’s be conservative and assume that RIM loses about $50 per PlayBook sold.

If RIM sells a million PlayBooks this Christmas, that’s a $50 million loss. That’s not that much. It’s less than one-eighth of RIM’s net income for one quarter. RIM would still have $830 million in cash.

The upside is that developers suddenly have a reason to build for QNX again. Some already did. Read this blog in BerryReview by one developer, who claims he’s already earned about $100 an hour for a PlayBook app after just four days of availability. That’s far more than he’s earned on apps he’s built for iOS and Android.

And that creates the positive feedback loop that will generate customer buzz, boost brand value, and eventually allow RIM to raise the price on future generations of PlayBooks.

That’s the epitome of the well-known strategy of giving away razors in order to sell the blades. Or, to modernize it, selling the printer at a low price in order to profit on the toner or ink.

The tablet market, like all mobile markets, is still up for grabs. Hardware lifecycles are short – 1-2 years. That’s why we’ve been able to see some mobile vendors rise incredibly fast, and others plummet like a rock.

I think RIM’s other coming moves – like the Mobile Fusion tools for IT, and Android app compatibility – will only build on the momentum it’s building today.

———–

The ironic thing about the PlayBook is that RIM must now hope that the Bring Your Own Device trend, which has hurt it in smartphones, will help bring many PlayBooks into enterprises.

But that’s the way it goes. In the new era, most organizations will have to deploy its own tablets as well as accommodate ones brought in by employees, according to the Universal Declaration of Workers’ Mobile Rights in the newly-published book, Mobility Manifesto: Transforming the Enterprise.

You can download the Manifesto at www.MobilityManifesto.com.

And take a 5-minute quiz to find out where your organization ranks on Mobility – a Laggard, Rookie, Dreamer or Leader. We’ll compare those results graphically against your peers worldwide (see below).

In order to tantalize/frustrate you a little longer, let’s first take detour along memory lane to 2003, and the Rise of the MachinesWeb 2.0.

As they became inundated with Web traffic, Web 2.0 startups looked for cheaper, less brute-force solutions than their dot-com predecessors would, such as buying Sun servers or renting T3 lines.

Enter “load balancing,” which describes the strategy of spreading out your Web or internal network traffic for better performance. This could be done in one of two ways: plopping in a switch-type product into your existing network, or re-architecting your network from several powerful central servers into a large, distributed ‘server farm’ made up of hundreds or even thousands of PCs.

Load balancing is no longer a hot topic, as the solution has pretty much trickled down from the Web to mainstream enterprises.

But mobility re-creates the need for enterprises to re-balance their workloads.

Why? When PCs were the primary device and 3G still just a dream, real-time access to data was neither important nor expected. Reports were e-mailed to you at regularly scheduled intervals – nobody went into Crystal Reports and pulled data themselves. Any ad hoc reports would be sent as a request to your friendly business analyst, who would then come back with something for you after several days or a week.

Today, we have powerful smartphones and tablets, 3G and 4G networks and easy-to-use mobile apps that connect directly back to the server. Everything on the front-end is enabled for real-time.

How about the back end? Not so much. Delays still abound. Suddenly, your application and data layers look out of balance again. There’s your Achilles Heel.

Of course, switching server applications or middleware to decrease latency can frankly be expensive. But the ROI can be well worth it.

I’ve often talked up the sheer scale of the mobile device deployments at my parent company, SAP: 11,000 iPads, 5,000 iPhones, experiments with the Samsung Galaxy Tab and Amazon Kindle Fire, etc.

What’s equally impressive, however, are what it’s done on the back-end.

SAP’s salespeople used to rely on Excel to track sales, one of many factors why “we had to wait 2, 3, 4 months to understand what was selling, what was not selling,” said Global Sales President, Rob Enslin in a recent video.

Now, his salespeople as well as SAP executives can get such information instantly on their iPads. This is enabled by the use of SAP’s HANA in-memory data appliance in conjunction with SAP BusinessObjects. Together, they accelerate the processing of 3 TB of CRM data so that it can crunched and manipulated by end users.

SAP heads know what I mean by the acronym COPA. It stands for the Profitability Analysis module of its long-standing ERP software.

HANA is also being used to speed up COPA internally at SAP. During a Tweetchat last week, CIO Oliver Bussmann revealed that HANA sped up processing time so much that a key KPI fell from 28 hours to 4 hours – a seven-fold improvement.

As Bussmann tweeted during his chat: “The combination of real-time data combined with the mobile access is the new killer app.”

In other words: if you want to get the most out of your mobile devices and apps, then you need to bolster, if not overhaul, your back-end systems. By doing so, though, you’ll regain your prior balance, but at a higher plane.

———

Time for a quick commercial: Sybase, an SAP Company, has just released a new book, Mobility Manifesto: Transforming the Enterprise, for which I was the editor.

You can download it at www.MobilityManifesto.com. Expect a mix of snarky observations about the plight of mobility-starved workers, possibly like yourselves.

Mixed in also is helpful business strategy and actionable IT tactics. All with a minimum of shilling for Sybase and SAP products.

You could even send a copy of the book or e-book to your boss or CIO. It’s easier than Occupying his or her office, and may turn out to be just as effective.

When mobile tools are treated as ‘executive jewelry’ available only to corner office-types, doesn’t that inequality create “We are the 99%” discontent among the rest of the employees?

Politics is beyond the realm of UberMobile. This blog isn’t meant to support, denigrate or trivialize the Occupy movement.

But there are some parallels between the Occupy movement and what’s happening – or not happening, as the case may be – inside companies today.

As always, the future is here, but it’s not evenly distributed, as cyberpunk author William Gibson wrote.

Resistance remains stiff in many quarters against new technologies despite being cheaper, more empowering, and likely to produce hard dollar benefits.

I’ll bring up mobility because that’s what I know. Some CIOs are charging head-first into mobility. Like Onyeka Nchege, CIO of Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated, who deployed hundreds of iPads to employees and encouraged them to install Angry Birds and other fun apps. His theory was that by letting them see the fun side of the iPad, they would get attached. And that it would result in lower breakage and loss rates than the ruggedized tablets Coca-Cola previously used. Nchege’s theory proved correct.

Or take Oliver Bussmann, CIO of my parent company, SAP. He’s deployed 11,000 iPads and 5,000 iPhones, runs an analytics data warehouse that crunches terabytes of data to return answers to iPad-using executives in a matter of seconds, and is building his own enterprise-compliant alternative to DropBox and iCloud.

But too many other CIOs remain stuck in a ‘command-and-control’ mode. Change is bad. Suggestions for new technologies from knowledge workers and field workers who know best what would would empower them get an emphatic “NO!” response if they don’t fit neatly into the existing master plan.

Little do they realize that the era of technocrats getting to dictate what software and hardware that employees must use is coming to an end.

The burgeoning ‘Bring Your Own Device’ is an expression of workers’ demands to be freed from the productivity-dulling manacles of the desktop PC. It’s also the recognition of IT departments that they need to start getting on the right side of this Transformation.

Are you unsure whether your company is on the right side of the Mobile Transformation? Check out www.MobilityManifesto.com to take a 5-minute quiz to see if your company is a Mobile Laggard, Rookie, Dreamer – or Leader. You can compare your results against other companies, and then comment (see below):

You can also send your company’s results to your boss or CIO! Anonymously, of course…

While you are at MobilityManifesto.com, get a copy of the new book, Mobility Manifesto: Transforming the Enterprise. Published by Sybase, an SAP Company, I was the editor.

Expect a mix of snarky observations about mobility-starved workers mixed in with business strategy and actionable IT tactics. All with a minimum of shilling for Sybase and SAP products.

You could even send a copy of the book or e-book to your boss or CIO. It’s easier than pitching a tent in front of his or her office, and may turn out to be just as effective.

InformationWeek thinks the Kindle’s Android OS is both insecure, and un-securable via Mobile Device Management (MDM) software. CIO Insight dismissed the Kindle tablet’s reliance on the cloud, while eWeek calls the Amazon brand too fundamentally consumer-y. Meanwhile, CIO magazine said the iPad’s just got too commanding of a lead within enterprises.

Whoa. I just had the strongest feeling of deja vu wash over me. It’s as if I read and heard these same exact opinions 22 months ago, except it was about the iPad vis-a-vis laptops (I might have even been guilty of writing some of it).

You know what they say: learn from history, or else you’ll let it repeat itself.

I know that’s not enough convince tech-savvy, logical readers like yourself. So here are five arguments for why the Kindle Fire will surprise enterprise skeptics:

1) Developers are coming! Like moths to a Fire, Android developers are being attracted to the Amazon tablet and making it their highest priority. 49% of North American developers are very interested in building for the Fire, according to an Appcelerator survey, ahead of second-place Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Some developers are no doubt attracted by things such as the Kindle Fire code becoming open-source. But most developers simply go where they think customers will be. That was the feedback loop that boosted the iPad. And it should boost the Fire and Android overall.

2) So are consumers. According to a recent survey, 77% of tablets used in the enterprise are purchased and paid for by employees via Bring Your Own Device plans.

Consumers, in other words. Who by and large remain extremely price-sensitive. For the cost of equipping mom and dad with $499 iPads, one could equip the parents, two kids and even the family dog, too, with five $199 Kindle Fires.

This is why there are studies like Retrevo’s that show more people planning to to buy a Kindle Fire than an iPad this Christmas. Or why DisplaySearch expects 6 million Fires to be shipped (versus 9-11 million iPads).

Expect millions of workers to start nagging their IT administrators in the New Year about when they can connect their Kindle Fires to the corporate network.

3) And so is IT. In an IBM-sponsored survey of 4,000 IT pros worldwide released last week, 70% said they plan to deploy apps for Android devices, versus 49% for iPhone and iPad, 35% for Windows 7, and 25% for BlackBerry.

On a more anecdotal level, I know two CIOs who have already started testing the Kindle Fire for internal use: SAP’s Oliver Bussmann and Sybase’s Jim Swartz. I have to believe that plenty of other CIOs are investigating Kindle Fires.

The reason is simple: consumer tablets are so inexpensive that they are the enterprise IT equivalent of a “disposable razor,” according to Yankee Group analyst Eugene Signorini. And no mainstream tablet is less expensive than the Fire.

(Interested in seeing some Android enterprise tablet deployments today? Check out my list here)

4) Also, corporate e-mail support is here. Microsoft’s Exchange email server dominates businesses, hands-down. And e-mail along with Web browsing remain core business uses for tablets.

Android may not offer native support – it’s a Google product, remember? – but there are capable and secure third-party Exchange-friendly apps already available. NitroDesk, for instance, announced earlier this month that its TouchDown e-mail client app for the Kindle Fire was available.

5) The Zen of Minimalism. For IT managers, less can definitely be more when it comes to technology. How do you think on-board graphics became near-ubiquitous in desktop PCs? Because companies wanted anemic graphics so as not to encourage their employees to while away hours watching Netflix or playing Halo.

So the perverse upside of the Kindle Fire’s 8 GB of storage and 512 MB of RAM – half of what the BlackBerry PlayBook has – means less data stored (and potentially lost), and fewer movies and games to be watched and played by procrastinating employees.

Similarly, the Kindle Fire’s lack of 3G/4G connectivity means one less headache for IT administrators worried about exorbitant data roaming charges from salesguys streaming movies in their overseas hotel room. The same goes for the inability of Kindle Fire owners to access the Android Market. Fewer apps, sure, but also much less exposure to malware.

In the past, a CIO could simply decree DropBox and iCloud verboten and his or her will would be carried out. IT management software would prevent banned applications from being installed, while network firewalls would block outlawed Web sites or network ports. End of story.

That’s not so simple today. Many smartphones and tablets used inside companies remain unsecured by Mobile Device Management (MDM) software.

At the SAPPHIRE conference in Madrid last week, SAP CIO Oliver Bussmann gave a talk to fellow CIOs about how SAP is using its subsidiary Sybase’s Afaria MDM software to secure the 11,000 iPads used by its employees.

“I had a CIO ask me afterward, ‘Should we also do this [use MDM] with our iPhones?’” he said. “It just shows how there’s a lack of information.”

Another issue is that many of the Samsung Galaxy smartphones and iPads used inside companies today are owned by the employees themselves, courtesy of shrunken budgets and the desire of workers to Bring Their Own Devices.

That creates a legal grey area in regions like Europe, where strong data privacy laws there allow workers to unilaterally revoke their consent for employers to secure and manage the data residing on their phones and tablets at any time. Allowing BYOD devices can create liability risk for companies.

Moreover, we’ve moved on from command-and-control IT shops towards the ‘consumerization of IT’ era. Conditioned to the slick devices and apps they use at home, employees are rebelling against the ugly, kludgy gear and software they are issued at work. It’s not just a matter of aesthetics. Consumer devices are more powerful and easier to use than their enterprise counterparts.

In this era, CIOs need to strike a balance between enabler – and dictator. That’s what Bussmann is doing. Using Afaria, he plans to shut down access to iCloud to his employees by the end of the month. “The risk is far too high,” he said.

But in closing that door, he plans to open another. His team has already created a prototype of a document-sharing service that will be released to employees by the end of year. Based on the WebDAV standard, Bussmann says the goals are to make it as easy to use as iCloud or DropBox for both mobile devices and laptops (something SharePoint, what many companies use today, is poor at), while also providing the security only an internal, behind-the-firewall network can.

Bussmann talked up the service at SAPPHIRE and says he got a strong reception from other CIOs. So strong, he says, that if things go well, the service might eventually end up being offered to SAP customers.

If you’re curious to learn more, you can ask Oliver himself during a one-hour Tweetchat tomorrow Tuesday November 15. Watch the #SAPchat hashtag starting at 11 am EST/8 am PST, and submit any questions using that hashtag.

For the first 35-odd years of its existence, SAP only marketed and sold its own software. We weren’t a platform vendor like Microsoft (Windows), Google (Android) or Apple (Mac OS X, iOS). So we didn’t need to woo, support or sell other developers’ applications.

It was a self-centered strategy that was borne out of a need to serve the many customers clamoring for our applications, as well as fend off our many rivals - IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and others.

You know how the story turned out: SAP grew to become the market leader (by revenue) in ERP, CRM, and business intelligence/analytics software. The Big Dog, in other words.

But as the enterprise market matured, it posed major challenges to SAP. Rather than rolling over and playing dead, we learned some new tricks.

One of those was launching the SAP Ecohub, an online marketplace for partner software and solutions, in 2008.

As independent analyst Dennis Howlett put it at the time: “EcoHub is a step in a fresh direction for SAP which has been perceived as a company that doesn’t sell products that are ‘not made here.’”

Three years later, SAP offers more than 1,000 partner-built applications via the EcoHub and other channels.

Even bigger than EcoHub was SAP’s $5.8 billion purchase of Sybase. Though also falling in the general category of enterprise software, Sybase has always been more of middleware and platform company than applications vendor ala SAP. It’s always cultivated developers and partners to build applications that connect to its ASE database or run on top of the Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP).

With these two moves, the next was a no-brainer: releasing our own Enterprise App Store. Called the SAP Store for Mobile Apps, it opened up stealthily on Halloween with more than 50 SAP and SUP-certified apps from partners today, ranging from sales to productivity to human capital management (HCM) running on iOS, BlackBerry and other platforms.

Debuting at the SAPPHIRE NOW + TechEd conference in Madrid this week, the Store is a key part of our strategy to build up an SAP-centric mobile ecosystem.

Even as SAP rushes to release more and more apps that connect with our applications, our goal is to have 80% of all mobile apps be built by partners.

So far, we’re not doing too bad. For SAPPHIRE NOW, 20 partners submitted 200 apps to be shown on the show floor. 100 were chosen (check them out at the SAP Partner Mobile App Catalog).

Why are developers starting to come to the SAP Store for Mobile Apps and otherwise build for SAP? I asked Usman Sheikh, the vice-president at EcoHub in charge of the new enterprise app store. He answered my questions and, helpfully, shared these slides.

As I discussed in my blog, ‘How Many Kinds of Enterprise App Stores are There Today?’, vendors are starting to deploy their own enterprise app stores, in order to provide a blend of the features in consumer-oriented app stores (easy browsing, instant purchase and download) and the kind of features required by enterprise users: flexible payments (credit card or corporate invoice), company discounts, the ability to check if your device or OS version is compatible with the app, as well as certification (by SAP) that apps will work with back-end systems, confirmed Sheikh.

Other features include pre-sales support for potential customers. These include a 1-800 number and chat and e-mail to reach SAP reps as well as the original partner developer. This supports the higher-touch model preferred by customers forking over not $1.99 per app, but potentially hundreds of dollars or more.

To accommodate line-of-business users who prefer to quickly get the app running in order to kick the tires themselves, SAP is offering its app store as an iOS app. See the screenshot below.

Longer-term, the SAP Store for Mobile Apps will be tightly integrated with the Sybase Afaria mobile device management software. Within weeks, users should be able to launch the SAP Store from within Afaria, said Sheikh. Afaria will also eventually be able to communicate with the Store so that only apps consistent with an employee’s role in a company are displayed, as well as help configure and install new apps. That integration will continue to grow. “Afaria will be the preferred MDM solution,” he said.

The Store not only supports apps built on Sybase’s SUP app development platform, but also apps built using other technologies such as the cloud-based Business ByDesign or SAP NetWeaver Gateway, Sheikh said. See the chart below.

And what about the all-important financial terms? Developers will get an 85% share of all app license and subscription revenue garnered through the Store, said Sheikh. In other words, SAP is taking 15% – just half of Apple’s 30% take for its App Store. Developers are not bound by exclusivity agreements, said Sheikh.

Sheikh said SAP will “respect” developers who wish to offer their apps on a freemium basis – i.e. free versions that can be converted later into paid via in-app purchases – but expects to receive their 15% cut of those subsequent in-app purchases.

As mentioned, apps must be certified by SAP before they can be sold on the Mobile Apps Store. That is free for the rest of the year.

How about for 2012? “It will be reasonable and competitive,” Sheikh said.

For now, the SAP Store for Mobile Apps will be focused on apps that either run on SUP middleware or explicitly hook into SAP server applications. But Sheikh anticipates the Store eventually growing to support more general productivity and business apps, provided they are relevant to SAP users.

Granted, the Store remains in beta today. Many of the features mentioned above, such as credit card purchasing and the ability to selectively offer apps to users based on their job role, won’t be ready til first or second quarter next year.

Even still, can you name another vendor-operated enterprise app store that is more advanced than SAP’s? If so, please share with me and other readers. For now, I think SAP Store is further proof that big dogs can learn new tricks.

Despite what the analysts’ might write, there are multiple, somewhat-overlapping definitions of the enterprise app store floating around in the minds of techies and business-types.

All of them borrow heavily from the original Apple App Store – that is, a Web site or mobile portal serving up apps to users. But they differ in how they work and who they are intended to serve. And none are likely to disappear soon.

It’s not as confusing or infuriating as it sounds. Just as the e-business era gave us two terms for corporate Web sites – employee-facing intranets and customer- and partner-facing extranets – I’d argue that mobile enterprise app stores can be divided into 1) those that face inward towards one’s own workers, and 2) those that are public-facing and aim at customers and partners. Let’s tackle them in that order.

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Internal enterprise app stores are what your IT manager or CIO probably thinks of, if they’ve been exposed to the marketing of any of a dozen-plus mobile device management (MDM) software vendors (including that of my employer, Sybase, with our Afaria software): a personalized portal for employees to download apps or updates on a self-service basis.

Self-service is important: you don’t want to force a fat new app or update down a skinny 3G pipe, especially if the worker is traveling and could incur expensive data roaming charges.

The stores securely host purchased or internally-developed apps on the corporate server, or point to external download sites, such as Apple’s App Store or a developer’s server. The white list of apps for each employee is sometimes auto-generated from the same Active Directory permissions that determine his desktop or laptop PC’s network access and downloadable applications. But more often, it is created or heavily tweaked by an IT administrator creating groups and permissions using the MDM application or service. The app store can also manage blacklists of apps or games, and help you manage complicated app licenses and purchases.

Despite the initial configuration work, IT administrators will save time from not having to manually track usage via Excel spreadsheets, and gain the control that they desire.

——

External-facing enterprise app stores come in three flavors. The first is what you would hear about if you quizzed a random smartphone-wielding person: a platform-run store such as Apple’s App Store, Google’s Android Market, or BlackBerry’s App World. It makes sense: there are some 28,000 paid and free apps in the business and productivity sections of Apple’s offering.

The advantage of these stores for enterprise developers is obvious: an established program with lots of potential customers. But there are key disadvantages for enterprise developers. The low-touch, high-volume model of these stores means that enterprise developers don’t get much control over how their apps are marketed, sold and delivered.

That’s key. Some enterprise apps can be marketed in freemium (easy-to-install free demo or limited function versions) models like consumer apps, but most cannot, as they require technical customization to get connected to a company’s database or server applications and start running.

——

Third-party app stores are the second category of external enterprise app store. They are easily-browsed indices of apps drawn from multiple sources:

- official app stores such as Android Market or App World;

- developers whose apps were not approved by Apple or RIM (read: adult), and/or run only on jailbroken or unlocked devices;

- apps that were uploaded by the developer or ISV themselves.

Third-party app stores can be quite large and popular. GetJar.com says it lists more than 366,000 mobile apps and games for a mind-boggling 2,500 different devices. It says it has offered 2.2 billion downloads to date. Another, Appia.com, says it has 140,000 paid and free apps drawn from 32,000 developers. Both have business or productivity categories.

For enterprise developers, the advantages are similar to the platform app stores: customers and a defined program. However, the sites tend to offer even fewer commerce and marketing features for developers than platform app stores. That’s because, as mentioned above, a large percentage of their apps are hosted elsewhere. In other words, a third-party app store works less like a storefront and more like a app store functions less like a storefront and more like a catalog (indeed, much of their revenue comes from Web ads and commissions for referred downloads).

In that way, third-party stores may get trapped into their niche as a simple aggregator of apps, and fail to build the m-commerce features desired by developers (and often by endusers). That could put them at risk of obsolescence, similar to the way dot-com era Internet Malls were quickly leapfrogged by eBay and Amazon.com.

——–

Vendor-operated app stores are also emerging. This is partly because of the availability of technology: many vendors of internal app stores sold to IT managers have also packaged their offering into white-label/OEM solutions for developers to publish externally. Appia and Partnerpedia come to mind.

The bigger driver is that vendors, as mentioned above, aren’t overjoyed with how large-scale app stores are connecting them with potential customers.

Rather than breadth, what vendor-run app stores want to offer is depth – depth that should be appreciated by both other developers and enterprise customers:

- online compatibility check to ensure that apps will run with your hardware;

- certification that vendor- or ISV-built apps will run with certain applications;

- support for multiple devices (i.e. RIM, Apple, Android);

- flexible purchasing terms (i.e. individualized customer discounts, or the ability to pay with credit cards or corporate invoicing);

- enabling high-touch interaction, such as connecting customers with support engineers, or system integrators before, during and after deployment;

- internal enterprise app store features such as enabling only employees in a certain position or department to download certain apps;

- deeper integration with internal enterprise app stores.

At the SAPPHIRE Madrid conference later this week, SAP will unveil its own Mobile App Store. Many of the above-mentioned features will be demonstrated there. Others, such as deep integration with the Sybase Unwired Platform and Sybase Afaria (and its internal enterprise app store features), are coming.

Look for the announcement later this week and my coming blog, where I’ll interview Usman Sheikh, vice-president of SAP Ecohub, to get a deep dive into the SAP Mobile App Store’s features and roadmap.

All the more reason to go into your mobile deployment forewarned about these potential annoyances – along with some potential solutions.

1) The headache of managing your wireless carriers. With 127,000 employees around the world, one of the biggest jobs for Stephen Jones, global mobility service manager at Proctor & Gamble, is trying to keep track of P&G’s 100+ carrier plans worldwide, and the implications thereof.

What implications? Preventing employees from using iPhones in certain countries because of high data rates is one. P&G also has to make sure that employees who live close to foreign borders (Buffalo, NY, for example) aren’t inadvertantly charged roaming rates.

“The phones don’t know where they are sometimes,” he said. Wildly-varying prices between countries also create a grey market of sorts, as some employees try to buy phones in one country to bring back and use in their home country, he said.

Potential solutions: Many mobile device management (MDM) software include telecom expense management (TEM) features that help simplify tracking and enforce your policies.

2) The surprising fragility of ruggedized devices. Ruggedized devices are hugely expensive because of all of their protective design and materials, as well as the military certifications for harsh environments that they possess. To keep TCO reasonable, many IT managers try to extend the life of ruggedized devices to five or even seven years – a surprisingly vain effort in many cases, it turns out.

One major reason is that workers never get emotionally attached to these homely, fun-free devices and thus tend to be careless with them. That indifference slowly turns to hate as the devices age, as resentful employees treat them even more roughly.

Potential solutions: At FedEx Ground, the company uses a lot of “less-technical approaches” to keep its 100,000 mobile devices safe, according to Matthew Berardi, managing director of field technology operations. These include making the devices wearable, i.e. putting them on wrists of warehouse workers to let them sort packages hands-free, and requiring workers to check-in their devices into storage lockers at the end of shifts.

Another potential solution: deploy consumer mobile devices like an Android smartphone or iPad instead, and encourage your workers to become emotionally attached to them by letting them check their e-mail and play Angry Birds on them. They’ll treat the devices with as much TLC as if they were their own, according to Onyeka Nchege, CIO of Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated.

Because they’re far cheaper than ruggedized devices, companies can view iPads and Kindle Fires like “disposable razors,” says Yankee Group analyst Eugene Signorini. Still, you can augment their longevity with an inexpensive after-market case like an Otterbox that offers near or true military-spec protection.

3) Strict industry or country laws make Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) hard to do. An increasing number of companies are like American Airlines, where Tony Winston helped negotiate “very aggressive discounts for unlimited data plans” for its employees, to encourage them to buy smartphones and use them at work.

Many others, however, are still more like P&G. The company only offers Bring Your Own mobile in Canada for managers, though it is running a 300-employee pilot in the US, Jones said. It hasn’t made headway in Europe and Latin America because strict data privacy laws make it more difficult for companies to control corporate data residing on employee-owned phones and tablets.

Potential solution: The right MDM software may be able to help you set management policies that provide adequate protection for your company while respecting individual data privacy laws.

4) Low budgets for mobility. In this economy, it afflicts companies in every industry, though it hits certain industries worse. One manager at a large US utility told me that all IT budgets and IT projects must be approved by government regulators.

Potential solutions: Sure, you could wait for an economic recovery or switch companies and/or industries. The better approach, if possible, is to try and gain the support of your business-side peers for mobility (see 6) below).

5) Untrained or rebellious users. This is not as common of a problem as IT workers, especially those manning the helpdesk, like to imagine. But it’s potentially more harmful. At PG&E, a huge percentage of the heavily-unionized workforce is nearing retirement, giving them little incentive to adopt new technology, said Joe Chung, MobileConnect Program Lead at the Northern California utility.

“I was talking to one of the users who is 8 months from retirement. He told me, ‘You can’t make me use it and you can’t fire me,’” he said. Even worse: some PG&E repairmen, leery of being tracked via the GPS in their devices, have tried to put tinfoil over the satellite antennas in their trucks (not realizing that the GPS chip and antenna is built into the device).

Potential solutions: For the untrained but willing, it can simply a matter of training. At Exelon, Johnson discovered that some of the drivers using the laptops had never used a mouse before. Exelon deployed mandatory computer-based training that covered basics like using a mouse for all of its drivers, said Johnson. For rebellious users, try giving reports or analytic dashboards to senior managers that show what percentage of their workers aren’t using the new technology, along with the ROI that is being lost.

6) Getting support from business-side managers. When GE Healthcare tried to deploy mobility five years ago, it failed in part because the managers of the field teams that would use the technology “didn’t see the need for change,” said Geoff Hunt, lean, productivity and technology programs manager for Americas at GE Healthcare. There are also the narrow, bottom-line focused managers who will view mobile deployments as expensive and non-strategic.

Potential solutions: More than ever, IT leaders need to get out of their shell, suck up their pride and woo their business counterparts to ensure that projects are a success. That means, says Hunt, “socializing your program around, getting them to feel like they have skin in the game, either by investing their budget or people.”

That doesn’t mean wasting your efforts on the many when you need just one.

“Lots of people may have veto power. You need to find the one person who can say ‘Go!’” he said.

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What are the biggest annoyances you’ve encountered in your corporate mobile rollouts?

The key is: ensure that mobile deployments, like any IT project, are true partnerships between the business teams that will use the technology, and the IT departments building it.

it’s so simple. Yet, it’s the natural tendency of IT to go it alone and take the attitude of “Build it and they will come (and like it).”

I’m not blaming IT here and saying it’s because they are a bunch of asocial Aspergers-afflicted oddballs, as shows such as The Big Bang Theory or The IT Crowd depict.

I mean, that’s probably true some of the time. But I’ve found in my working life that the tendency towards prideful secretiveness, lazy non-communication and treating other departments as enemies rather than colleagues is pretty dang universal.

Doesn’t matter what department you’re in or whether your department is full of introverts or social butterflies.

Ted Johnson, IT manager for mobility support at Chicago-area energy firm, Exelon, said that talking to his business peers was key to discovering that many of the utility repairmen who were due to get ruggedized laptops had “never used a mouse before.” Learning about that early on gave Johnson’s 18-person team time to develop computer-based training that addressed that issue.

“If IT leads too much, you WILL miss business requirements,” he said during a presentation this morning at the Enterprise Mobility Exchange in Las Vegas. “It was so critical to have business involved.”

Starting in 2006, Exelon rolled out 2,300 ruggedized Panasonic laptops to its utility repairmen in an effort to automate work orders and speed up the time to fix electrical outages. The success of that project, he says, was also due in part to the creation of three levels of committees with the business-side managers. These included a steering committee comprised of direct supervisors and lower-level managers of the repairmen; a governance committee of senior managers; and an executive committee of C-level types.

This proved key when Johnson began measuring the results of the laptop rollout and discovered that some drivers were actively resisting the technology.

Johnson smartly gave the executives a dashboard showing usage of the tool to the executive committee members. Once they discovered the problem, they “drove it down to their managers to get on their people” to use the laptops, he said.

Similarly, Onyeka Nchege, CIO of Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated, also created a high-level Enterprise Mobility Advisory Group (EMAG) of executives for his deployment.

That may seem contradictory: Nchege’s goal at the time was moving IT at Coca-Cola from its traditional role as “order-takers” to business. “Our service was absolutely there: tell us what you want, and we could get it done, and get it done for you quick,” he said during a presentation on Wednesday at the Exchange.

So wouldn’t you want to get less advice and less feedback from the know-nothing business guys? Not says Nchege. “We proactively sought feedback even while we took ownership,” he said. “By getting feedback from our business partner, we got instant credibility. ‘Man, you asked me what I thought.’ They understood that we’re building this for you and building it for us.”

Nchege even took the step of accompanying one of the field sales rep managers to a visit with a restaurant owner to better understand their challenges simply trying to get the attention of a busy potential customer.

Nchege had a hunch – maybe arming the field salesguys with then-new iPads could help break the ice with restaurant owners in places like Mobile, Alabama? So he rolled out the Apple tablets to them. His hunch proved correct.

“We had an uptick in sales and on-premises business as a result of putting iPads out there,” he said.

Nchege recognizes that the uptick won’t last forever. He says getting the iPads out in the hands of salespeople was a quick, momentum-building win.

But Nchege says that simple step helped him immensely bridge the gap between business and IT. There must be similar steps you can also take, no matter how busy you are.

“You may think you’re the only one running 100 miles per hour, but guess what? Everyone else is like that,” he said.

That’s what Coca-Cola Bottling Co. did when it rolled out iPads to its salespeople, according to CIO Onyeka Nchege.

“We encouraged them to put a game or two on there, to play Angry Birds,” he said during a presentation at the Enterprise Mobility Exchange in Las Vegas on Wednesday morning.

The result? Employees “take care of them [the iPads] because they think ‘I like what I got,’” he said.

Not only that, but Angry Birds has helped cut Coca-Cola’s training costs for the iPad because it’s been a “teaching tool for how to manipulate objects on the screen,” according to John Leabeater, lead mobile analyst for Coca-Cola.

Now, before you start dismissing this as soft-as-tofu logic that just randomly happened to work at Coca-Cola, other experts at this small conference held at the Venetian chimed in in agreement.

Kevin Benedict, an independent mobile analyst who served as moderator at the Exchange, just returned from visiting a company in Australia that employs 700 service technicians. When the company used devices ostensibly built to repeated drops and falls, they would still “break like crazy,” according to Benedict. But since switching to iPads, only 2 out of 700 have broken in the first year, simply because workers like the iPads and treat them with TLC.

“The way iPads and other consumer mobile devices are being treated by employees is very different” from ruggedized devices, said VDC Research analyst David Krebs. And even if they break, they can be replaced “like disposable razors,” said Yankee Group analyst Eugene Signorini. He believes that the refresh cycle for ruggedized mobile devices of 5-7 years will likely shrink to just 2 years with less-expensive consumer devices like the $199 Amazon Kindle Fire.

Indeed, the consensus among speakers at the Wednesday morning session at the Exchange conference – an invite-only gathering of 150 CIOs and mobility managers – was that ruggedized devices were in huge trouble.

That’s significant because the Exchange conference has traditionally catered to companies in blue-collar industries deploying rugged mobile devices for harsh environments. Think utility engineers carrying ugly Windows Mobile-based gear.

But you’re already seeing reports that the U.S. Army plans to switch to Android and iOS devices.

And soon, you’ll see delivery drivers and repairmen wielding iPads or Android tablets in protective sleeves running slick apps.

“The rugged device makers have got to wake up,” said VDC’s Krebs, who is probably the market’s leading watcher of the rugged device and field service market. “Not to be too aggressive, but nobody wants to be the next RIM in the room.”

That doesn’t mean bringing Angry Birds to the handheld scanner wielded by a warehouse worker. But it does mean that the user interfaces and capabilities of the apps and devices used by non-office workers need to be improved so they don’t lag glaringly behind their consumer counterparts.

But after that, what? Well, securing and managing those devices, aka Mobile Device Management, aka MDM, is necessary, of course.

But at this point, your company should be treating MDM the same way you treat brushing your teeth or taking a shower: as a necessary component of good hygiene that needs no reminder (I hope).

Now, some may argue that virtualization is a better alternative to MDM to cure your mobile security blues. I’m not a fan. With my affiliation to Sybase, I’m obviously biased. But think of your experience today using your company’s VPN. Yep, it’s more secure, but it turns your laptop lethargic, as if it took some of that drowsy-inducing allergy medication hiding in your medication cabinet.

Having to download everything from the server is not only slow, but when you’re roaming and only 3G or 4G access is available – it’s also potentially expensive. And for anyone who’s run Windows on their Mac and thought the whole process slow and kludgy, expect that it will be the same if not worse if you had to switch back and forth between mobile hypervisors.

Mobile Device Management doesn’t have to be painful. Nor should rolling out apps, provided you do it strategically.

But I digress. My point is that a lot of companies aren’t sure what to do after the tablets and smartphones roll in. By default, they’re doing exactly what they shouldn’t be doing: allowing workgroups and departments buy their own apps in an isolated, uncoordinated fashion.

That lets some employees get what they want, fast. But it leaves many other employees jealous or fuming. And for the IT department, it does two things. The first is prevent them gaining any degree of control and governance over their mobile infrastructure.

Indeed, the bar for mobile management keeps rising. The market is quickly moving away from MDM-only towards mobile device AND application management. Some people like my colleague Milja Gillespie at SAP are calling this Enterprise Mobility Management.

The second disadvantage for CIOs and IT managers who are not proactive about apps is that they cannot roll them out in a strategic way that helps them lower TCO and boost ROI, according to a recent whitepaper entitled “A Guide to Successfully Deploying Enterprise Mobile Applications,” by Yankee Group analyst, Chris Marsh (full disclosure: commissioned by SAP).

Marsh asks the key questions and sets out a comprehensive framework for IT leader-types for deploying mobile apps the right way. You can see some of his recommendations and tips in Milja’s blog.

But to get the full download, join him and Milja and SAP vice-president Dan Mahowald for the Nov. 1 webcast, part of SAP’s ongoing Mobile Sense Thought Leadership Series. You can register here. Registrants get a free copy of Marsh’s whitepaper.

Another way to learn how to deploy mobile apps the right way is to see how cutting-edge companies are doing it today.

For that, I suggest you follow my blog and Twitter over the next several weeks, as I’ll be covering the Enterprise Mobility Exchange in Las Vegas on Nov. 2-3.

The list of speakers from the user side is the most impressive I’ve ever seen, including companies such as GE, Philips, American Airlines, Coca-Cola Bottling Co., PG&E, Papa Johns Pizza, FedEx Ground, P&G, Southern California Edison, Exelon, Sempra Energy, Webalo, Vivint and more.

I’m not talking about that slide deck you hastily prepped for the last quarterly meeting, full of static blocks of Times New Roman mixed in with stolen-via-Google images.

No, today’s better PowerPoints now incorporate features like animation, fancy layouts and beautiful graphics. These are the kind that can help a sales or marketing person successfully seduce buyers. And they are precisely the kinds of PowerPoints that can get mangled when you bring them to an iPad.

Microsoft Office doesn’t run on the iPad (and no word from Redmond when it might). There are various other solutions, most of them from parties external to Microsoft and Apple. These approaches all work, but only to a degree.

One ‘solution’ is to convert the PowerPoint to a JPEG or PDF. These are viewable on the iPad’s slide show viewer. The downside? You ‘flatten’ the files into single, static images. As a result, you lose all animations, videos, music and spoken voice-overs.

Another solution is to convert the PowerPoint to a video file. This has the advantage of retaining all animations and multimedia. There are two problems, though. Large file sizes, for one. The other, more subtle issue, is that while videos work great for single, uninterrupted viewing (think of a solitary user viewing it at his desk via the Web on-demand), they are inflexible for interactive scenarios, such as presentations by salespeople.

Still another solution is to use a viewing/editing program like Documents To Go, QuickOffice or Apple’s Keynote on your iPad. Some let you retain the original PPT/PPTX file, though the ones that let you edit the PowerPoint itself on an iPad tend to convert files over to their own format (like Keynote).

If the original file format is retained, though, editing capabilities tend to be primitive. If the software converts the file format to something other than PPT, the risk remains that graphic formatting and animations will not run 100% perfectly.

This near-100% document fidelity* is what SlideShark promises it can deliver, according to its maker, BrainShark. The free mobile app became available on Tuesday; you can view a demo here.

Waltham, Mass.-based Brainshark has been around since 1999. The 200-person company’s core product is a Web service called, naturally, BrainShark, that lets users turn static PowerPoint presentations into self-playing multimedia-rich videos.

SlideShark claims it displays rich PowerPoints on iPad better than its competitors.

BrainShark’s prior app, called BrainShark Mobile, displayed these enhanced videos on iPad, iPhone as well as Android devices.

SlideShark is very different. Rather than turning PowerPoint presentations into videos, SlideShark tries to ensure that animated, medium graphically-rich PowerPoints display as well as possible.

This is something competitors haven’t solved as well as SlideShark, asserts David Klein, mobile product director at BrainShark, even though he says it is in high demand: 70% of the hundreds of thousands of PowerPoints in Brainshark’s existing repository rely on animations.

By solving this problem, salespeople will be able to use the iPad for interactive presentations. Enterprises will make more sales, and recoup more ROI from their iPads, says Klein.

These are all bold claims. I’d love to hear from readers who’ve tried SlideShark and other PowerPoint/iPad solutions on whether SlideShark is indeed better.

Future versions of SlideShark will likely support Android tablets and include more analytic tools for marketing and lead generation purposes, Klein said. But there are no plans to turn SlideShark into a full-fledged slide creator/editor, ala Keynote.

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* In its FAQ, SlideShark says “While the App is optimized for PowerPoint, there are a few features that are not supported. These include: hyperlinks on slides, embedded videos or animated gifs, slide transitions, triggers, and 3rd party components. There are also some advanced animations that may not be supported.”

The futurist coined the term Information Overload back in 1970 to describe the difficulty to grasp an issue or make a decision in the presence of too much information.

This was 41 years ago — 23 years before the World-Wide Web emerged. So either Toffler was himself easily confused by information, or just very prescient (considering his big-brain credentials, it’s probably the latter).

One research firm, Basex, estimated in 2007 that the distraction of e-mail caused a $650 billion drag on the U.S. economy.

Now, some might argue that the problem is not too much information. It’s bad or low-quality information mixed in with the good. And the resulting difficulty in differentiating between the two.

Others might argue that the problem is too much raw Data, and too little expert Knowledge.

I don’t know. All I know is that I experience the dizzying paralysis of Information Overload many times daily, whether reading Yelp reviews of a new restaurant, or researching a flatscreen TV purchase, or simply sifting through my e-mail at work.

And my wife hesitates to upgrade to a smartphone because she worries that anytime, anywhere access to apps (FaceBook Mobile, TweetDeck for iOS) and e-mail will steal her few remaining brain cells not already allocated towards kids, house, food, driving, chores, etc.

I suspect the ambivalence that some readers might harbor towards enterprise mobility and mobile business apps stems from a similar fear.

Specifically: fancy blinking dashboards that let you drill down all the way to hyper-granular real-time data will overload you even more, becoming the Second Coming of Work E-mail.

That could paralyze the best of managers and lead to poor decisionmaking, a focus on tactics at the expense of strategy, and creat a reactionary rather than deep-thinking culture.

Oliver Bussmann, CIO at my parent company, SAP, acknowledges that this is something his team has given a bit of thought on how to prevent this.

With 10,000 iPads and 4,000 iPhones in use internally, SAP has deployed, or is in the process of deploying, 28 business apps to different teams inside SAP.

Take the mobile BI and analytics app, BusinessObjects Explorer built by SAP. Using the HANA in-memory data engine, salespeople can use BusinessObjects Explorer to query and drill into 12 million active customer records and 700 million historical records in real-time, versus the 4-5 hours it used to take to run a report.

And employees are taking advantage, with some checking dashboards and KPIs every 5-10 minutes, or the same frequency that they check e-mail on their smartphone, he says.

For some employees, that is the right pace and the right amount of data. For others that need to focus only on the big picture, like SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott, that would be irrelevant data and information overload.

So Bussmann’s team made sure to configure the BusinessObjects Explorer for his iPad to be “very simple.” The default view shows revenue pipeline for the top 100 customers. McDermott also gets 2-3 other macro-views of SAP’s business data.

On the other hand, middle managers and very tech-savvy folks are allowed to slice and dice all of the data using more than 34 different selection criteria, he said.

I think this makes sense. Just as the app’s UI design is key, so is the flexibility for integrators or IT to create different default views and settings for different kinds of employees. One-size-does-not-fit-all in the business world.

This is different than e-mail, where it’s difficult to enforce a gateway against e-mail you don’t want. People you don’t want to hear from will keep sending you mails.

The moral: mobile business apps don’t have to contribute to Information Overload. Tuned properly for the right employee, they can deliver the right level of data to the right people.

The result? Knowledge, not noise. Learning, not overload. Decisions, not paralysis.

———–

Now for something pretty related: SAP is hosting a webinar tomorrow (Tuesday Oct. 18) at 11 AM ET/8 am PT on its new HR and HCM (human capital management) apps.

SAP VP of marketing for HCM Vanessa Sailor and Nish Pangali, director of SAP’s HCM Center of Excellence will take you through a half-dozen new apps.

You can register for this webinar here.

Seeing his 10-year-old daughter chat with an after-school tutor live via the tablet. Watching the 22-minute homage to American Idol that she created with three friends using an iPhone and iMovie. Or observing his 6-year-old son figure out Bluetooth networking and search Google all by himself.

“Instead of giving my son a screwdriver so he can take things apart, the iPad is the same sort of tool,” Jahng told me on the phone recently. “It’s the best $499 I’ve spent.”

The iPad is inspiring the sort of learning and creativity in Jahng’s kids that Heathkits, crystal radios and, let’s be frank, PCs, did for generations past.

Indeed, Jahng is so enthralled by his kids’ self-learning that he’s thinking of getting another tablet. He’s not alone, of course. U.S. parents were expected to spend $20 billion on computers, smartphones like the Droid X, and tablets for their college and K-12 children this back-to-school season, according to the National Retail Foundation. Preliminary NRF figures show those expectations were met, with sales at electronic and appliance stores this year were up 2.5% from last year.

Mobile Devices Already Mainstream

Clothes, pencils and even laptop computers remain staples, but they are being increasingly shoved aside by mobile gadgets.

In other words: in spite of the weak national economy and cost-conscious shoppers, as many as one out of five students were expected to bring new tablets or smartphones to school last month, according to a survey sponsored by PriceGrabber, a unit of Experian.

Tablets and smartphones inspire creativity and learning the way that chemistry sets and crystal radios did a generation ago.

The mainstreaming of mobile technology is no shock to anyone who has the slightest bit of contact with today’s youth. Americans of college age (18-24 years old) send an average of 1,640 texts per month, or 55 a day.

Middle and high school students (13-17 years old) are twice as prolific, according to Nielsen, sending an average of 3,364 text messages a month, or a whopping 112 per day.

Educators are arguably being even more aggressive. 2,300 school districts in the U.S. are using the iPad, including 600 that have 1:1 iPad:student classrooms.

At http://ipadpilots.k12cloudlearning.com/, I list more than 170 colleges and 150 K-12 schools and school districts that have deployed iPads on a mass scale. Recent large adopters include Longfield Academy in the UK, which rolled out 1,400 iPads this fall, Archbishop McCarthy HS in Florida, which deployed 1,200 iPads to students and Zeeland HS in Michigan which gave away 1,800 iPads to students.

Or take Long Island University has deployed 5,000 iPads to students and faculty in its first year, and expects to roll out 10,000 by December.

“We started to realize that the need for PCs is starting to die,” CIO George Baroudi told me last fall when the rollout began. “The mouse is dead,” declares Baroudi. “Long live the finger!”

Tablets aren’t a superficial techno-fad. Their unique strengths are being taken advantage of by educators. In a psychology course at LIU, students use iPads to track the progress of autistic children. Meanwhile, geography students are using the iPad’s built-in GPS receiver to make maps and analyze earthquakes. At Zeeland High School, students are using an iPad app to study from flash cards for a literature quiz.

“Now we can spend more time doing critical thinking — applying those terms on those flash cards,” a student told USA Today.

Textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has developed math apps that have been shown to boost student proficiency by 30% over regularly-taught classes.

What That Means for Employers

The aggressiveness with which schools and students are embracing mobility is a good lesson for those of you in the adult world.

But don’t let this blog fool you: Generation Mobile isn’t arriving years from now. They’ve already arrived. Chances are that they have already invaded your workforce today, bringing their preferences and skills.

According to a survey in the summer by Kelton Research and sponsored by my employer, Sybase, an SAP Company, 58% of U.S. and U.K. workers desperate to use their preferred mobile device at work (aka Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD) say they would give up free coffee in exchange for that right. 39% would give up free food, while 20% would even give up a vacation day.

Their desperation stems from this simple fact: their employers’ IT departments haven’t caught up. Almost half (44%) complain that they don’t have access to enough mobile applications to do their jobs as well as they can from their work computers. Meanwhile, less than a third (29%) think their IT department is good at managing mobile devices.

For organizations who likely already employ members of Generation M, the lesson should be as easy as an ‘A’ in a ‘Rocks for Jocks’ course: embrace mobility because a fast-growing swath of your workforce not only expects to have mobile tools at their disposal, but because they have the mindset and know-how to take advantage of them.

Do so, and you’ll transform your business for the better, enabling your company to ‘school’ the competition. But eschew mobility, and your company will run into a fate much more serious than an ‘F’ on a report card.

Listen to these two webcasts – part of the SAP Mobile Insights series – and you’ll learn how deep they are, too.

On October 11 (11 am ET/8 am PT), SAP senior vice-president for mobility Nick Brown will demonstrate some of the latest mobile apps to come out of the Mobile Applications Unit (MAU) at SAP.

Register here.

These include apps in the areas of CRM, ERP, Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) and Governance, Risk management and Compliance (GRC). Apps that can streamline and accelerate processes, boost revenues and deliver quick ROI.

Many organizations, having laid a strong foundation for enterprise mobility (deployed smartphones and tablets and started managing them), are ready to go to that level.

And as I wrote in a previous post, if you rethink the business concept of ‘lowest-hanging fruit’ as being about projects that quickly return ROI to you, then deploying mobile business apps makes a ton of sense.

Another recommendation for the Oct. 11 webinar: Brown is essentially the number two guy overseeing the MAU group, under Sybase CMO Raj Nathan. So he knows these apps in and out. And having moderated a talk with him in front of analysts at SAP TechEd last month, I know he’s a smart guy and a straight shooter.

Just a week later on October 18 at the same time, SAP vice-president of marketing for Human Capital Management (HCM) Vanessa Sailor and Nish Pangali, director for the HCM Center of Excellence at SAP, will co-present demos of SAP’s latest HR and HCM apps

Register for the HR and HCM webcast here.

Half a dozen of these apps are planned for release this quarter.

And a shout out to the SAP Education team and its partner, Door Consulting Ltd.: they’ve just released a new mobile debugging and troubleshooting tool for ABAP developers.

1) Dual-band GSM and CDMA in iPhone 4S. A long-requested feature from an influential, vocal minority: rambling, travelin’ business-types. Now they have a true ‘world phone’ that makes it easy for them to roam overseas, and drop that aging BlackBerry 8830 for good.

Enterprise implication: For non-managed or weakly-managed phones, data roaming is dangerous. Your CEO or biz dev exec could come back from a long trip with a multi-thousand dollar surprise. Especially now that the iPhone 4 S’s data transfer speed doubles to 14.4 Mbps (downstream).

Managing your employee roaming via a true Mobile Device Management (MDM) software like – egregious plug! – Sybase Afaria, becomes even more vital.

2) Three Tiers of iPhone. Til now, Apple only actively sold two iPhones at any given time. Now it’s going after the mass market by 1) introducing the iPhone 4S; 2) ramping up shipments of the iPhone 3GS by making it free (with carrier contract), rather than cutting it, as it would have done in previous upgrade cycles.

Enterprise and Developer Implication: Apple says the iPhone 3GS will run the new iOS 5. But how well? If poorly, then many consumers and enterprises may stay, at least in part, on iOS 4. It may not be at the state of Android, but this does increase, ugh, fragmentation. That means headaches and rewrites for IT managers and developers.

3) Sprint gets the iPhone. It looks like America’s No. 3 carrier just committed to paying $20 billion to share a phone with AT&T and Verizon, with no exclusive or early access to a 4G-based iPhone 5. I guess this is the best deal Dan Hesse could get from Cupertino.

Enterprise implication: Sprint is expected to offer unlimited data plans for its iPhone subscribers. For businesses seeking cost predictability and bandwidth buffets, Sprint becomes very tempting, I would think.

4) iOS 5 debuts.

Enterprise Implications: I covered this when iOS 5 was first announced at WWDC in June, but here’s the rundown again:

- iMessage communications service, aka BlackBerry Messenger killer, that creates a potential new security hole for IT managers to plug with the right MDM software.

- iCloud backup, which is useful for small businesses with no other layer of data protection, but could contravene industry regulations or data privacy laws.

- Over-the-air activation, which greatly simplifies iPhone and iPad deployment for IT managers.

5) Siri voice controls debut. Star Trek teaches us that voice interface is an important feature. But it has almost always failed the real-world test. The voice-recognition software gets confused by a speaker’s accent, or mishears words because of background noise. Because of Apple’s push for quality, I have some faith that Siri will work well, but I want to, um, hear more.

Developer implication: Apparently, none yet. That’s because Siri for now appears only to work with iOS’s built-in apps like the SMS, calendar, ‘Find My Friends’ etc. Apple doesn’t appear to have announced an SDK for third-party developers to create their own apps leveraging Siri.

Of course, I’d used the expression many times before in conversation and writing. But it had remained a little abstract to me, a cliche employed thoughtlessly – and, ironically, when I wanted to sound smart – to describe easy-to-achieve goals, fast ROI projects, etc. etc.

It hit me one bright day while scanning the candidates competing for the title in our garden. There were the tomatoes swaying from bent-over vines that we’d forgotten to pull upright with a wooden stake. There were also the tiny strawberries and raspberries clinging to stunted little bushes. The winner, it turned out, were the massive orange pumpkins plopped right on the dirt.

Turns out there’s a fruit even lower-hanging than a pumpkin on the ground. Can you guess?*

This got me thinking: what are the lowest-hanging fruit for mobilizing enterprises?

The reflexive, no-brainer answer would be: deploying smartphones and tablets to employees. Nothing easier to do than buying a bunch of iPads at the mall and passing them out to eager hands.

But if we define low-hanging fruit as being about Return on Investment, than passing out devices would not win. And while I think Mobile Device Management (MDM) software is a necessity, it’s hard to show ROI until your employees lose their encrypted, protected devices (which hopefully is not right away).

Rather, I would argue that deploying mobile business apps can be your company’s lowest-hanging fruit. I know that sounds strange: don’t apps come after you have the devices, after the MDM software? True that. At the same time, deploying apps can often be as small and tidy as their name, in contrast to the expensive, lengthy timelines of their big brothers, server applications.

Also, apps can offer surprising bang-for-the-buck in terms of boosting revenue, slashing costs and delivering ROI.

Arming salespeople with CRM data to help him or her better sell is an obvious win. Unsurprisingly, the first app from my employer SAP/Sybase was a sales automation app for BlackBerry.

With the popularity of iPads among doctors, another low-hanger is giving doctors and nurses access to patient data via tablet so that they can do more-informed, faster diagnoses. That’s why SAP is building a mobile dashboard for doctors that does just that.

Still another is in the area of field service: enabling technicians and repairmen to better manage work orders and download equipment information. That’s what SAP’s Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) Work Order app, released in late September, does.

The integrated maps in SAP’s new EAM (Work Order) app helps field techs get to the right location on time.

Finally, giving managers access to HR metrics and processes is another easy winner. What boss wouldn’t want to be able to approve leave requests or expenses from their mobile device in between meetings? It beats letting them pile up and disgruntling your employees. Or how about being able to get a quick, real-time update on employee headcount and other metrics, via which you can then drill down to individual employees?

Those features are among the six HR apps that SAP announced today that it is prepping for release this quarter. Other apps include an Interview Assistant for hiring managers and a Timesheet app that captures hours worked in real-time.

Keep track of key talent with the new SAP Employee Lookup (HCM) app.

The link above the pic is to the press release, which includes links to video demos of all these new apps, which are available on iPad, iPhone and BlackBerries.

There will also be an October 18 webinar introducing these apps.

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* It’s actually something that most people don’t realize is a fruit, and also grows so low as to be actually underground: peanuts.

On the latter, there was almost too much to geek out over. There were Tesla’s ‘trainable’ manufacturing robots, which wowed my kids but felt a little early-Skynet to me. There was the eco-tastic choice of materials for the Model S, like the compressed banana leaf veneer for your door and dashboard. It’s really cool, but to future Model S owners: Please don’t name-drop it at your next cocktail party lest you sound like Ron Burgundy mentioning his leather-bound book collection and apartment smelling of rich mahogany. And while a lot of you have heard about the Model S’s peerless electric battery system, did you know it can now beat the BMW M5 and other muscle-bound Euro luxury sedans in a sprint?

I’ll focus on the Model S’s infotainment system, based around the vertical 17-inch LCD screen that takes up the entire center console ((there is another 12.3 inch LCD screen in front of the driver that will display speed, fuel battery life remaining, etc.)

In the party tent, I spoke to several of the engineers working on the system and gleaned some details not previously reported at the Model S’s prior unveilings. While I think it’s extremely exciting for consumers and pushes the state-of-the-art for mobile electronics, its viability for would-be developers remains unclear.

Is the Model S’s 17-inch LCD-based system the future of in-car infotainment?

Let’s start with the good stuff. At about 100-plus square inches, the LCD is about 3 times larger than the 10-inch screens (about 36 square inches) of the iPad and the next-largest car display, the 2009 BMW 7-Series. Indeed, the tennis-racket-sized screen is about 8 times larger than the 6-inch screens in most of today’s conventional 2-DIN LCD car stereos/DVD players. Imagine playing Angry Birds on that.

Here’s the not as good. The screen as of today is a single-finger multi-touch display (according to a Monday e-mail from a Tesla spokesperson). Instead of the projected capacitive technology used by the latest smartphones and tablets, the screen uses infrared.

Now, there are two kinds of infrared touchscreens. The first is a relatively old technology that has been used in point-of-sale systems and outdoor displays. The second is a variety its makers like to call ‘optical imaging’ and which is used in modern multi-touch-enabled PCs like HP’s TouchSmart. It sounded like Tesla is using the latter variety. Thus, I’m guessing that the single-touch is a correctable software issue.

Optical imaging screens do have two chief advantages over capacitive screens like the iPad. First, users are not required to use their bare finger (which creates an electrostatic charge detectable by a capacitive touchscreen. That means users can be wearing driving gloves on the Model S screen. Perhaps more important, optical imaging screens are way cheaper today than capacitive ones at sizes like 17-inches.

Despite all of that, Tesla might still move to a capacitive touchscreen, I was told.

On the internal guts: the system will run an ARM-based Nvidia Tegra CPU/GPU combo. Today, that would be the Nvidia Tegra 2 based on the dual-core Arm Cortex-A9.

By the mid-2012 release of the Model S, however, it could be a Tegra 3 (Kal-El) that will be five times faster than the Tegra 2 inside the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, the Lenovo IdeaPad Tablets, the Motorola Xoom and others. Or it could even be a Tegra (Wayne) with a 4-core ARM Cortex-A15 that will reportedly be 10x faster than the Tegra 2.

With heat generation and energy draw not an issue compared to a tablet or a smartphone, I would guess Tesla will use as powerful of a chip as possible. That’s good for developers envisioning graphics-rich apps, but bad as it makes it harder for them to plan and start coding.

As I mentioned, the overall software is based on an unspecified flavor of Linux (definitely not Android), (Tesla is indeed using Linux, confirmed the spokesperson, NOT QNX, as per a tip I received from a reader) and is completely built from the ground up, along with the user interface, by Tesla. While not directly managing mission-critical components like the steering wheel or engine, the infotainment system still must communicate with them, while controlling very important things like the door locks and other cabin controls, the navigation/GPS, air conditioning, music, etc.

Speaking of the GPS: as of now drivers can navigate using either Google Maps or a full-fledged text-to-speech GPS app licensed from Navigon (not finalized, says Tesla). Navigon is a German-based GPS maker that was, even before its acquisition by Garmin, focusing on GPS apps for mobile devices rather than selling standalone hardware units (a wise move in light of market trends).

Pandora has inked the most integration deals with car stereo makers. I was told that Tesla plans may (according to Tesla spokesperson) to include a Slacker radio app in its system. I applaud that. While I use and subscribe to both services, I tire of Pandora’s music suggestions, which feel as unadventurous as FM radio formats. I find Slacker is much better at taking my playlists and favorites and suggesting new, unheard-of artists and rare songs from existing bands and singers.

You will be able to stream Pandora and play music or video files residing on your smartphone or tablet onto the Model S system. A big if: whether you’ll be able to control your iPad or Droid in general from the Model S. Being able to type a quick note-to-self into your iPhone’s Evernote app from the Model S’s virtual keyboard, or check sales contacts residing in your SAP mobile CRM app, would be a great feature, but one engineer seemed unsure how much virtual connectivity would be available. If it does build it, Tesla is leaning towards iOS, though this is not definite.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk had said back in March that the Model S would support 3rd-party apps and text-to-voice capabilities. The latter “can address some of the issues with driver distraction,” he said at the time.

I heard conflicting things on how this would be achieved, though. One engineer said that Tesla might make it possible for mobile apps from Android or iOS to run on its system. That suggests a real-time compatibility middleware, like the Java Micro Edition runtime still popular on featurephones, or what RIM is building to run Android apps on its QNX OS-based BlackBerry PlayBook.

The advantage of that approach is that it would bring many apps over to the Model S quickly. The disadvantage is that the apps may not run perfectly or fail to take advantage of the Model S’s screen and UI. You could end up with situations like the written-for-iPhone Redfin real estate app, which looks pixelated and primitive when run on my iPad – but far far worse.

The contrasting approach, which I was also told that Tesla is considering, is to offer a custom SDK (Software Development Kit). This would require developers to invest in the time and labor of rewriting their apps or creating original apps.

For developers of car-specific apps, this would’ve been the only way to go, anyway. Note: the Model S does use the standard CAN (Controller Area Network) protocol for electronic communication between car components.

But for more general ISVs, taking a game or productivity app onto a platform that will only have 20,000 potential buyers in its first year will be much less tempting, when you weigh the now hundreds of millions of Android users.

The other reason Tesla may favor the SDK approach is that it can help ensure that the apps do not interfere with the Model S’s other real-time, mission-critical systems such as the steering, battery, etc.

A third, semi-complementary approach is to wait and hope that HTML-5 will spur the creation of many Web-based apps. The Model is well-positioned for that scenario. Its Web browser is based on the Webkit engine, which also powers Safari and Google Chrome, i.e. iOS and Android. I didn’t ask more details about ACID compliance, etc.

Back to hardware: connected devices include a rear-view safety camera and Bluetooth integration with your mobile phone for hands-free calling. External slots include SD card and 4(!) USB ports. There is no DVD disc player. Videos can be still be played via streaming or files uploaded via the above slots. I forgot to ask what kind of storage the Model S will use, but my guess is that it will be an SSD.

As for wireless connectivity, the options today include Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and 3G via a GSM modem chip. T-Mobile or AT&T would be the obvious carrier candidates, with the latter presumably in the lead for its larger customer base/footprint. Tesla might still yet swap that GSM chip out for a 4G modem with another carrier, though, I was told.

The Model S will probably prove to be the state of the art for in-car mobile devices when it launches next year, ahead of BMW’s iDrive. The 17-inch screen is just that impressive. But with the glut of mobile platforms out there, I think Tesla needs to announce its developer program as soon as possible.

Only Apple can get away with holding its iOS cards so close to the vest, because everyone has faith that it will deliver something amazing and millions of buyers will follow. Most other platform makers are more like Microsoft, banging the drum for every new Windows Phone feature months ahead of time repeatedly til you’re almost sick of it, while also offering copious technical and financial assistance. Despite its sexycool, the Model S market will be tiny for the next several years. To woo developers, Tesla may have to take more of a Microsoft approach here.

Let me explain. Taiwan and China’s rise in the last two decades as the world’s leading mass manufacturer for, well, almost everything, is due to the energy, discipline and, let’s face it, penny-pinching ways of everyone in the supply chain, especially the factory bosses, who even in mainland China remain predominantly Taiwanese.

It’s these guys, not Andy Grove or Steve Jobs, who do the dirty work enabling miracles like the fact that the today’s computers cost the same as they did 25 years ago and yet are many tens of thousands of times more powerful.*

They do this by selling at razor-thin margins and betting on volume to eventually take them into the black. That’s long been Bezos strategy, going back to the dot-com era when Amazon was growing like a weed but still losing money. So Amazon may very well lose $50 for each of the first several million Kindle Fires it sells, as various Wall Street analysts predict.

But at that bold price point, it is very likely to sell tens of millions of Kindle Fires. And, of course, there are those millions of Amazon e-books, movies and music downloads to sell you…

How bold is $199 for the Kindle Fire? Not only is it 60% cheaper than the $499 iPad 2, but it is 33% less than the now-$299 BlackBerry PlayBook (which debuted only 6 months ago at $499). The PlayBook, like the Kindle Fire, runs Android, is made by the same Taiwanese manufacturer (Quanta) and sports nearly identical hardware to the Kindle Fire, down to the 1 MHz TI OMAP dual-core processor. The Kindle will run Android apps on launch, while the PlayBook, based on BlackBerry’s QNX OS, still cannot.

Six months ago, I predicted that the tablet market was set to split into three segments: A high-end enterprise segment with the Cisco Cius and the Avaya Flare, a media tablet segment with the iPad, PlayBook, Xoom, Galaxy Tab and others, and a ‘FeatureTablet’ segment comprising lesser-known vendors like Archos and Chinese off-brand Shanzhai makers, and limited-use e-readers like the Kindle or Nook.

Similar to FeaturePhones, I figured FeatureTablets would appeal to price-sensitive mainstream consumers, especially with their $100-300 price tags. They would mostly run Android, sport single-core ARM chips, relatively-short battery life (think 4-5 hours), inferior touchscreens (stylus, anyone?), and often a poor selection of apps (subsets of the Google Android Market or, in the case of e-readers, none at all).

The Kindle Fire throws gasoline on the whole FeatureTablet category and sets it ablaze. Why would you buy a cheap $140 Coby from Walgreens when for $60 more you can get what just 6 months ago was the most powerful tablet around? Especially when you’ll get access to millions of e-book, video, music and even app content via Amazon’s on-demand stores. Granted, these aren’t free, but neither are most good apps.

Amazingly, the $199 Kindle Fire is Amazon’s high-end model. Other more traditional (i.e. e-reader) models will be priced at $189, $139 and $109 (without ads – with ads pushed to you, they get as cheap as $79).

The Kindle Fire is strictly a consumer device. It won’t make any inroads into big business. As Forrester’s Sarah Rotman Epps blogged, “we won’t see companies like GE and Mercedes Benz deploy the Kindle Fire for their enterprises the way they have with the iPad.” Nor do I expect the Kindle Fire to push Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend forward the way the iPad has.

And it is far from an iPad 2 killer, though I think it likely will accelerate Apple’s release of a lower-priced iPad to compete with it (does $300 sound reasonable to you? Does to me).

While the Kindle Fire destroys the chances of most low-end makers, I think it will still accelerate the tablet market overall by introducing millions of people to them. These people will eventually add or trade up to more full-fledged tablets that they’ll want to tote into work. In this way, many vendors will benefit, as well as apps makers, and the enterprise mobility market will continue to grow.

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* The downside, of course, is some/many of these factories are sweatshops with terrible conditions, conditions bad enough that there were a spate of suicides at Apple’s chief supplier, Foxconn, in 2010 and this year. On the other hand, most of these jobs pay far better than their alternatives, like farming.

Of course, I only really meant consumer apps. To argue last year that mobile enterprise apps was the next Big Thing would’ve been premature, and let’s face it, dishonest. The infrastructure was lacking. And neither the supply nor the demand was there.

The pieces of the enterprise mobility jigsaw puzzle have fallen rapidly into place this year.

Let’s take infrastructure first. Version 2.0 of the Sybase Unwired Platform introduced in the spring brought two huge improvements. First, it made mobile development accessible to tens of millions of Web developers. Second, it introduced hybrid Web containers. Using SUP’s middleware layer, hybrid Web apps offer rich, native app functionality with the quick development time (and easy portability) of a browser-based Web app.

Version 2.1 of SUP, introduced on Tuesday, extends this a couple of ways. First, it introduces a standalone SDK (Software Developers Kit) as part of SUP that provides even more tools and pre-built components to get rich apps up and running faster. Second, it introduces an OData SDK for developers to more easily create lightweight Web-based apps (think HR approvals like expenses or vacations) that can nevertheless quickly link to SAP server apps using the SAP Gateway.

The latest version of the market-leading Afaria device management platform also now manages billing and deployment of apps from Apple’s new Business-focused App Store, aka the Volume Purchase Program for Businesses. This had been a subtle but omnipresent pain point for IT managers.

Let’s also tackle the issue of supply. There will be more than 50 apps available from SAP and partners by year end, said Nick Brown, senior vice-president for strategy in SAP’s mobile applications unit, during a panel I hosted on Tuesday at TechEd. These include the very-impressive Electronic Medical Records (EMR) app aimed at doctors and set for release later this fall.

While at least 19 of them will come from Walldorf, the majority will come from partners. Partners like Cognizant, the $5-billion-a-year multinational technology services provider. Cognizant is about to release an HR app built using SUP 2.0. This will compete with the 16-odd HR apps SAP has already confirmed as being part of its latest batch of apps. But Girish Ogirala, director of the mobility practice at Cognizant, isn’t worried. Companies like his that are closer to customers and specific industry verticals will have no problem out-hustling SAP, he said during the same panel as Brown. Brown smiled – but didn’t protest.

And that’s it: While building apps would seem to pit SAP/Sybase against the very developers it wants to lure as SUP customers/partners, that has stopped leading ISVs such as IBM, Accenture, Deloitte, CSC, Infosys, Wipro, Tata, Cap Gemini and others from building apps on SUP.

In part that’s because SAP is doing its best to downplay that conflict. For instance, SAP is developing a mobile app store for launch in the first quarter of next year. SAP and partner apps will get equal billing, says Brown. Indeed, Brown said that while SAP is committed to selling the apps it developers (unlike in the past when it bundled some for free along with its server applications), it might conceivably one day give away SUP for free – if the market required it.

Gold? I came to this thar Valley looking for Silicon!*

How about customer demand? While not yet mainstream by any stretch, companies are deploying apps. According to one survey, 86% of Fortune 50 firms already offer mobile apps. Another survey by Kelton Research found that 20% of firms were planning to deploy more than 20 apps this year.

General Mills, Tellabs, Home Depot, P&G, Halliburton and Rubbermaid are among the companies running mobile apps using SUP. Or how about Nongfu Spring Co. Ltd., the largest bottled water maker in China? The company has deployed SAP HANA in its back-end to calculate the time and cost of delivering new shipments. What took 24 hours running an Oracle database takes only 37 seconds with HANA. But real-time is wasted if you can’t deliver that info anywhere. So Nongfu is arming 8,000 of its field sales reps with mobile devices and apps that will be able to call up that information for customers in, as noted, less than a minute.

I’m not saying 2011 – or even 2012 – is the year that enterprise mobility goes mainstream and mobile ISVs reap the benefits. But before you can pan for gold, you need to buy your mule and pickax and pick the spot where you plan to panhandle. For developers who want to get in on the enterprise gold rush, that time is now.

* You can thank/hate on my blogger-in-arms Derek Klobucher for the caption.

My feet felt sore for three straight days. I can’t even imagine what torture it was for the high-heeled women – and there were some there, surprisingly – in attendance.

With Microsoft Tech Ed feeling like a New Year’s Eve in Times Square, I was initially hoping that next week’s SAP TechEd in the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas would feel like a smallish dinner party by comparison. I’m not optimistic.

(Side note: How did my parent company and Redmond to erect a truce over the nearly-identical names of their technical conferences (Microsoft, as noted above, puts a space between the two abbreviated words, while SAP does not)? Especially since the firms compete in enterprise software and for the hearts and minds of tens of thousands of the same developers? Especially since the conferences were reportedly started only TWO YEARS APART from each other (1993 for Microsoft’s Technical Education conference, 1995 for SAP’s). Can a nearly-imperceptible difference really be enough to prevent the lawyers from being unleashed? Am I kicking a hornet’s nest/picking a scab by mentioning this? Should I stop with the rhetorical questions already????)

SAP TechEd is expected to draw 16,000 attendees this year. Granted, that’s spread across four events: after Vegas, TechEd will hit Bangalore, Madrid and then Beijing. But Vegas remains the big draw.

Moreover, TechEd 2011 will, for the first time, include Sybase’s user and developer conference, TechWave. This will only boost the overall attendance. If you’re coming, expect to learn about everything from scalability improvements in the ASE database to the latest boosts to the pattern-recognition features of analytics server Sybase IQ, to the latest mobile commerce offerings from Sybase 365.

The theme of this year’s TechEd is gamification, or what I call “developers putting explosion sounds into spreadsheets apropos of nothing”. TOTALLY KIDDING. As someone who is both easily bored and instinctively competitive, I’m totally in favor of techniques that make work more interesting and fun.

Anyway, there is plenty to see surrounding enterprise mobility. Here’s a preview.

(Side note 2: If you’re not coming to Vegas, there are many ways to keep up to date:

• Twitter: @SAPTECHED, the hashtag #sapteched and @SyTechWave
  
• Press Releases: Sybase.com and SAP Newsroom
• Session Videos: Virtual SAP TechEd

You can also come to SAP TechEd in Asia and elsewhere, or the SAP World Tour 2011 events.)

1) 110+ mobile-related sessions. Here’s the list for TechWave and the list for TechEd.

If you’re an analyst or SAP Mentor or journalist, chances are that you’re invited to Tuesday afternoon’s mobility panel. I’ll be moderating a group of experts including Nick Brown, senior vice-president for strategy in SAP’s Mobile Applications Unit, Himagiri Mukkamala, senior director of engineering for Sybase on its Sybase Unwired Platform and Girish Ogirala, director of the mobility practice for Cognizant, the $5-billion-a-year IT services provider. Expect an interesting debate around apps, platforms and more.

2) SUP 2.1 news. It’s no surprise that Sybase will be unveiling improvements to the Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP) at TechEd, in particular with the SDK. The SDK is significant, as important as SUP 2.0′s debut of hybrid Web containers for easy cross-platform development at SAPPHIRE just 4 months earlier.

SUP, if you hadn’t heard, is being embraced by customers – nearly half a billion dollars worth of business in a year, as ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett revealed this week. it’s fast becoming the middleware of choice for enterprise app development.

In the meantime, here’s some highlights, up-to-date as of Sept. 6, 2011:

- Largest deployment – American Airlines, which plans to roll out 6,000 Samsung Galaxy Tabs (10.1-inch) as in-flight entertainment devices to first and business-class passengers. American Airlines is jumping head-first into tablets – it is also rolling out thousands iPads to its pilots. American’s rollout is more impressive than other airlines like Alaska. Not only will American pilots use iPads serve as flight manuals, but the FAA has approved their use as interactive maps and navigation charts.

- Most impressive rollout to-date – University of Southern Mississippi, for its just-started pilot to roll out 1,000 tablets – also Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1s – to honor students. The Tabs come loaded with the Blackboard Mobile Learn, the mobile version of the well-known learning management system of the same name. Blackboard supports Android, iOS and BlackBerry devices today. It enables students and teachers to communicate, access assignments and grades, write blogs and comments, etc.

So you have to applaud the University for deploying proven educational software that help the students take full advantage of the Tabs. On the other hand, Blackboard emerged before social media and smartphones did. Its interface and platform reflects it. Some startup competitors, such as ePals (full disclosure: my brother works here), say they offer a more flexible, Facebook-like platform.

- Most widely-deployed device – by number of confirmed devices, that would be the Galaxy Tab. But in terms of number of customers, the Cisco Cius narrowly edges the Tab today. When Cisco released its enterprise tablet in July, it touted five organizations across various industries that were piloting or already using the Cius. By ROI, the most impressive is Nottingham University Hospitals, which claims the use of the Cius along with portable IP phones lets doctors access information outside of work and then make diagnoses and treatment changes. This has sped up treatments and shortened hospital stays, generating an estimated 292,000 pounds in annual savings. ROI was achieved in just 4 months.

- Most ambitious deployment – the owner of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News newspapers is ripping a page out of the mobile operator model. It plans to sell 2,000 Android tablets to consumers at an upfront discount, but bundled with a digital newspaper subscription. “No one in the U.S. has bundled the device with content,” Greg Osberg, the newspapers’ CEO, told AdWeek. “We want to gain significant market share in this area, and we want to learn about consumer behavior. Our goal is to be the most innovative media company in the United States.” Pricing hasn’t been revealed, except that subscriptions will likely cost less than $75/year. Rivals aren’t standing still. The Tribune Company, publisher of the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune, is thinking of offering the same bundle, using the Samsung Galaxy Tab as its device.

- Most diversity – that would be my parent company, SAP AG. Led by CIO Oliver Bussmann, SAP is rolling out iPads (8,946 as of September), iPhones, Samsung Galaxy Tabs, and BlackBerry Playbooks. Not bad for a company that a 18 months ago was still an all-BlackBerry shop. The company is also drinking its own champagne, deploying the mobile apps it is building with its Sybase subsidiary.

- Biggest long-term impact – Considering the glacial speed at which U.S. government agencies normally operate, the embrace of mobile devices by various agencies is downright speedy. Besides iPad deployments that you can see at my other list, the Coast Guard has approved the use of iPhones and Android-based smartphones, while the Navy and Marine Corps are close to the same approval (click on the aforementioned links for excellent coverage in InformationWeek by my former IDG-colleague-turned-foreign-expat, Elizabeth Montalbano). The Army is already testing a wide variety of mobile devices for classroom and battlefield use, including a mobile battlefield network app running on Android.

Outside of the military, there is also interest in Android. The Department of Veterans Affairs has added procurement of tablets such as iPads and Android models to its existing enterprise contract. And the BlackBerry Playbook has been certified as compliant with Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS), a key prerequisite before agency procurement. The Playbook is reportedly the first tablet to gain FIPS certification.

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Heard of any other large-scale Android deployments? Drop me a line or comment below!

Though that certainly has happened. Vendors that have deployed hundreds or thousands of iPads installed with marketing and CRM apps to the field include Medtronic, Abbott Laboratories, Boston Scientific, Otsuka, Zimmer and Life Technologies.

But salespeople in every industry are going mobile. What’s distinctive is how mobile is transforming how healthcare providers interact with patients. Within 9 months of the iPad’s initial release, almost a quarter of U.S. doctors were using them. By the end of this year, about four out of ten will own them, according to another survey.

Institution-wise, Ottawa Hospital is deploying 2,300 iPads for clinical use, while Victoria Hospitals (Australia is deploying 600 iPads to its medical staff. Other adopters include Cedars-Sinai, Kaiser-Permanente, Kaweah Delta, Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston, University of Chicago Medical Center, and many others.

Much of the usage today is ad hoc: doctors can handwrite diagnostic notes or access some patient records via their tablets. Even in these limited use cases, it’s proven useful.

But what if there was an app that provided a 360-degree, unified view into a patient’s medical history, medications, X-rays, and vital signs? That’s what SAP’s coming Electronic Medical Records (EMR) app provides.

Jan Korten, a solutions manager at SAP, and Thilo Berndt, the product development manager for SAP’s mobile healthcare apps, debuted the EMR app during an August 31 Webinar. You can watch the 1-hour presentation and slides here. But in the meantime, here’s an illustrated summary of what they covered.

Ten SAP developers in Europe have been working on the EMR app for the past 3 months. Just finished, the app – iPad today, Android tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab tomorrow – is about to be piloted by a trio of European hospitals and then released at the end of October, says Korten.

Above is the central dashboard of the EMR app. From it, doctors – and, in future versions, nurses – have quick access to patient records, a list of medicines taken, pictures of X-rays, medical allergies and even a real-time view of vital signs.

There’s a lot of talk about how a smooth, slick user interface is an important competitive advantage. In healthcare, however, an easy-to-use, powerful UI is mission-critical. While doctors are often very gadget-y, they are also impatient and too busy to deal with a lot of training. An intuitive UI that easily delivers the right information can actually “save lives,” says Korten, a former doctor himself.

Here is the Vital Signs screen. Doctors can see which indicators are out of normal range (in red), and zoom in and out of the data. The data is sent real-time via Wi-Fi. Indeed, most of the data displayed by 1.0 version of the EMR app is streamed directly from the server, with only small amounts encrypted and cached on the iPad itself, according to Berndt.

The next version will use the Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP) middleware to store more data locally for offline access, handy when doctors are in network “dead spots” within a hospital. It will also be able to download data via 3G.

Doctors can view patient x-rays today. Future versions may let doctors take photos with the iPad and upload them to the patient records database, said Korten. Indeed, while v1.0 of the EMR app is basically read-only, future versions will be fully two-way, letting doctors (and nurses) enter diagnostic notes, capture vital sign data, and more.

Here’s the high-level technical architecture: app running on multiple devices (some now, some later), multiple applications and data sources on the back-end, and the SAP Mobility Platform in the middle. This lets the devices access servers via one of three ways: SUP, SAP Gateway, and Netweaver. SAP today ties into Siemens’ i.s.h. medical records platform. According to Korten, the roadmap includes the ability to tie into Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS) and Lab results databases built by 3rd parties.

And here’s the high-level architecture, from a business point-of-view. According to Korten, this provides business opportunities for independent developers and SAP partners: adapters that connect 3rd-party medical server applications and databases to the SAP Mobility middleware, or other mHealth apps that rely on SAP Mobility middleware to tie into multiple back-end data sources.

Even before the release of the EMR app, SAP had already developed the Collaborative eCare app. While EMR is aimed at doctors, Collaborative eCare is used by caregivers in conjunction with patients suffering chronic diseases such as diabetes or congestive health failure.

Because their diseases are often so long-lasting, patients typically must endure many appointments with their doctors to finetune their treatments. These can be lengthy and inconvenient for both parties. Calling and e-mailing their doctor or nurse can save some time, but result in patient data scattered all over the place.

With Collaborative eCare app, patients can upload data on their symptoms and medicines taken to their doctors while at home. Doctors can adjust dosages and change prescriptions and set reminders for patients to take their medicines via the app. Alerts can even be sent via text message to the patients.

Here’s a video explaining more in-depth how Collaborative eCare works.

It’s funny, because it’s true. Android device makers – the ones who propelled the platform to global top dog in just three years – fear that Google will tie Android more closely with Motorola smartphones and tablets, giving that brand a technical and business edge that will translate into greater sales for Motorola – and hurt them. Some are already whispering that they are looking at alternatives like Windows Phone 7 or even webOS.

But that’s the OEM world. Instead, let’s THINK POSITIVE. After all, there are plenty of ways that Google + Motorola could benefit enterprise customers, in the medium-term.

The first is the Android fragmentation problem. Google’s affection for Agile and Extreme Programming has resulted in too many versions of Android in too little time. The coming Ice Cream Sandwich will be Android’s 9th major release in 3 years. This fragmentation is compounded by Google’s relatively loose oversight over smartphone and tablet makers, who implement Android differently for every new model.

This gets into a fundamental difference between how consumers and companies think. Consumers love choice. That’s because they generally only own 1-2 versions of any given thing at a time. But anyone who’s had to provide tech support for several different brands of smartphones or TVs in their home has probably regretted not having standardized on Sony or Toshiba.

For developers, fragmentation is a mixed bag. More potential customers is great, but then there’s the headache of extra coding and testing.

For companies, there is no upside, just extra work coding and testing their custom apps, and more time for training, device testing, deployment, assessing security risks, and overall managing the devices.

“Simplification is required in the corporate environment – keep it simple – if you stick to a standard interface you can have more variety,” said Oliver Bussmann, CIO of my parent company SAP. “Right now fragmentation is a road block.”

SAP is preparing to roll out Samsung Galaxy Tab tablets, in large part because of additional layers of security on top of Android built by Samsung in conjunction with Sybase. It has eschewed other Android devices. Other firms are largely doing the same thing. One statistic shows iOS holding a 4:1 edge over Android among enterprises.

The irony is that if device makers start to pull back or even drop Android, that could actually wake up some of the enterprises currently paralyzed by choice. Not many, but definitely some.

The second way this merger could help enterprises is in the area of patents. The lawsuit by Oracle and the sabre-rattling by Microsoft has Android developers spooked. The small ISVs, yes, though any fear is tempered by the fact that most have few sue-able assets. Rather, it’s the enterprises building custom B2B apps that are most scared that if Google loses, Microsoft or Oracle could start coming after them. That has also stalled Android momentum. It’s too early to say definitively, but it seems that Google may have purchased the protection it wanted.

The third way this merger could help Android is by injecting Motorola’s enterprise capabilities and pro-enterprise culture into Google. RAZR aside, Motorola was mostly a supplier of large businesses and government agencies for most of its 80+year history. It has decades of experience devising mission-critical hardware for large enterprises, from its telecom hardware to ruggedized walkie-talkies and smartphones for military use.

These capabilities have not atrophied. Only weeks earlier, Motorola bought an Android mobile device management company founded by ex-Google Android engineers called 3LM.

Buying Motorola doesn’t transform Google into an enterprise player overnight, not by a long stretch. But within 12-18 months, I expect tangible benefits for the CIO crowd that will make Android much more attractive to enterprises.

I think it went pretty well: we answered almost 30 questions from and went for a full hour (we were originally scheduled for just half an hour).

In between, Philippe and I cracked wise. For those keeping score at home, Philippe aka The Heel (bad guy in pro wrestling jargon) bore the brunt of Eric The Face (good guy)’s verbal body slams (I kid, I kid).

If you couldn’t make it this morning and are interested, below is an edited transcript of our discussion. Thanks to SAP’s Kevin Cassidy (aka @SocialKev or @SAP on Twitter), who also served as our moderator.

It’s replete with links and theme music: I entered the Tweetchat to the thundering keyboards of ‘Sirius’ by the Alan Parsons Project, aka the Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls entrance music, while Headbanger Phil chose the portentious bombast of ‘Welcome Home (Sanitarium)’ from Metallica.

Crank up one of those songs as you read on…

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SAP SAP

Welcome to our first ever #SAPChat! I’m your host Kevin Cassidy & we have Eric Lai (@EricYLai) & Philippe Winthrop (@biz_mobility) with us

ericylai Eric Y Lai @socialkev Should we start cranking up our entrance music? Here’s mine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdCzixCxZEQ&feature=related #sapchat

SAP SAP Eric is a tech reporter-turned-in-house-blogger for @Sybase (@SAP) covering the evolution of enterprise mobility at @ZDNet, @Forbes #SAPChat

biz_mobility Philippe Winthrop Here’s my intro music http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7LOilr_or0#SAPChat

SAP SAP Philippe is an enterprise #mobility advisor, pundit, quasi-analyst, and enthusiast with @the_emf_dot_org #SAPChat

Q1:

dslovensky David Slovensky #SAPChat – so what is your view on IBM’s mobility strategy?

biz_mobility Philippe Winthrop @dslovensky from what perspective? mobile applications or mobility management? #SAPChat

biz_mobility Philippe Winthrop They partner with people on enterprise mobility management, but they r building out their mobile enterprise application strategy #SAPChat

Q2:

jess_SAP Jesse Anarde Is it possible to use web services as a data source in SUP that require more than basic http authentication? eg. Sharepoint #SAPChat

jess_SAP Jesse Anarde If so are there any examples of how SUP/Sharepoint integration has been done? #SAPChat

ericylai Eric Y Lai @jess_SAP Yup those are good ?s. I may have to pass U over to a product mgr here at Sybase. Tell me why interest in Sharepoint? #sapchat

jess_SAP Jesse Anarde @ericylai Attempting to use remote sharepoint site as a src. since it has exposed wsdl thought it should be possible with SUP. #SAPChat

jess_SAP Jesse Anarde @ericylai but requires authentication through IIS and I’m not sure there is a way to authenticate beyond basic http in SUP. #SAPChat

ericylai Eric Y Lai @jess_sap Interesting. What technical issues so far? Tell us more. #sapchat

jess_SAP Jesse Anarde @ericylai also having same challenge with netflix rest API and their open authentication process. #SAPChat

jess_SAP Jesse Anarde @ericylai may be an issue with how I’m attempting to model it in context of MBO. #SAPChat

Q3:

brucelai brucelai what’s does mobility management mean? #sapchat

biz_mobility Philippe Winthrop @brucelai Check out http://bit.ly/mXfxf7 for more information on enterprise mobility management #SAPChat

KyBedard Kyle Bedard administrator to oversee operation of mobile phone? RT @brucelaiwhat’s does mobility management mean? #sapchat

biz_mobility Philippe Winthrop Administrator to oversee operations? What about all the enterprise mobility deployments coming from the line of business? #SAPChat

ericylai Eric Y Lai@brucelai Yo baby bro – here’s a quick primer from Forrester on mobile dev mgmt (MDM) – http://zd.net/p7vDPi #sapchat

ericylai Eric Y Lai @brucelai and also chk out www.theemf.org Philippe’s awesome mobility site lots of good primers, discussions… #sapchat

Q4:

lucagrilli Luca Grilli #sapchat How is the SUP adoption around the world? Here in Italy is taking off (may be slowly)

biz_mobility