SAP CIO Shares 2012 Mobility Deployment Plans

SAP’s CIO Oliver Bussmann, famous for rolling out one of the largest iPad deployments, is advancing toward his goal of being device agnostic by rolling out Android devices to SAP next week.  Although he is bringing a Kindle Fire as well as two Android devices (a Galaxy II S smartphone and a Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet), an iPhone, an iPad, and a BlackBerry with him on his tour to the 2012 International CES and the AppNation Enterprise Summit, he does not think the Kindle Fire is ready for the enterprise.

In November, Bussmann mentioned that he planned to test the new Amazon Kindle Fire for enterprise deployment at SAP as part of his device agnostic strategy. Since then, he has been testing an SAP BusinessExplorer app for the Kindle Fire. Bussmann does not think the Kindle Fire is ready for corporate use yet due to its lack of support for important business features such as VPNs, device encryption, and Microsoft ActiveSync.

Other Android devices, however, are ready for enterprise use in Bussmann’s estimation.  Next Monday, SAP will begin deploying Android devices, and will favor Samsung devices such as the Galaxy II S and the Galaxy Tab in the deployment.  In February 2011, Sybase announced a partnership allowing Samsung mobile devices to be optimized for Afaria, Sybase’s mobile device management system.  SAP manages its existing iPad deployment with Afaria and has chosen Samsung as its preferred Android device because of the security and consistency provided by Afaria.  Bussmann hopes to see 1000 Galaxy Tabs deployed at SAP by the end of 2012.

More iPads are in store for SAP employees as well.  SAP had deployed 14,000 iPads by the end of 2011 and Bussmann expects to see 20,000 iPads deployed at SAP by the end of 2012. The first wave of iPads were issued with CRM and BI tools installed to managers and salespeople.  Now, knowledge workers at SAP who generally remain in their offices are beginning to receive iPads.

Read more about Bussmann’s plans for mobility at SAP on Eric Lai’s UberMobile blog at Sybase.

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