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SAP Afaria in the Cloud – enterprise functionality, consumer pricing

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Broken SmartPhone
One of the most interesting announcements which came out of SAP’s SapphireNow conference in Orlando last week was the Afaria in the Cloud update. This is a real game-changer (an expression we use very rarely) for a number of reasons.

Afaria, if you are not familiar, is SAP’s mobile device management (MDM) product. What does that mean – it means Afaria secures, monitors and manages all types of mobile devices (smartphones, tablet computers, mobile POS devices, etc.). Because mobile is making organisations far more efficient, as we’ve written previously here, more and more industries are deploying them. And thus the need for MDM solutions to protect mobile devices, to reduce risk and increase employee productivity.

Typical MDM functionality allows for over the air (OTA) updates, remote tracking and wiping in the event that the device is stolen, and sandboxing of personal and work-related mobile functionality, for example.

During the announcement at SapphireNow, one of the light-hearted potential usage scenarios mentioned was that as a reward for hitting sales targets an employee might be allowed to play Angry Birds for a set duration.

The fact that SAP are now offering this as a cloud option is significant because MDM offerings typically require a server to control the devices. There can be significant cost and time factors associated with the purchase and deployment of the MDM server. This is done away with with the cloud version. But still, this isn’t entirely game-changing, right?

No, the real game-changer came when SAP announced the price for Afaria in the cloud – €1 per device, per month. And it is possible to trial it for free for 30 days. Sitting in the announcement it occurred to us that that kind of price makes Afaria in the Cloud suddenly attractive, not just to organisations, but also to regular parents looking to keep their children’s mobile devices safe.

As far as we know, this is the first time SAP have offered a product at such a low price point for enterprise customers. This pricing is almost as if SAP were aiming it squarely at the consumer app market. I know if I had an option to safeguard my kids mobile devices for €1 per device per month, I’d grab it. In a heartbeat. Unfortunately we can’t test Afaria as the free trial registration page doesn’t include European countries in its list of available countries. Yet. Although countries like Vanuatu, Uzbekistan and even Somalia get to try it out 🙁

It seems SAP is getting very aggressive in its cloud pricing options. We’ve heard that the TwoGo ride-sharing app will be similarly priced (€1 per user, per month) when it’s official pricing is eventually published.

Cloud price wars anyone?

Disclosure – SAP paid my travel and accommodation expenses for this conference

Image credit Tom Raftery

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Things are changing fast in medicine, thanks to mobile.

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Wow – this is an amazing video on just how much smartphones can help reduce costs, increase healthcare efficiency and improve patient well-being and outcomes.

Screen Shot 2013-05-07 at 14.56.26

We may not be fully there yet in terms of the widespread availability of this hardware and software, and then there’s getting it accepted by the medical establishment, but this is certainly a big step in the right direction.

A search in the iPhone App store for the term ‘Glucose” returns 217 apps and a similar number for the term ‘ECG’, while a search for ‘Glucose” in the Google Play Android apps store returns over 1,000 results

Things are changing fast in medicine thanks to mobile – exciting times ahead.

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SAP releases mobile app for utilities customer engagement

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They say the secret to any good relationship is communication.

Most utility companies don’t seem to have received the memo though. In a lot of cases, the only time you hear from your utility company is when you receive a bill, or a disconnect notice. Neither are very positive forms of communication. It is no wonder then that utility companies generally are not held in high regard.

In an effort to help utility companies improve their communications, and connect more closely with their customers, SAP this week launched their Utilities Customer Engagement mobile app. The new mobile app is available now for download from the iTunes Store and Google Play.

SAP Utilities Customer Engagement

The app has lots of cool functionality, such as the ability to see and pay bills, check consumption and outage information and High Bill Alerts and other messages in the Message Centre, to warn customers when their bill is going to be higher than usual. This would have been very handy for PG&E to have had back in 2009 when their smart meter rollout was incorrectly blamed for customers suddenly receiving higher bills.

Facebook reported last December that the number of people accessing the site from mobile devices now exceeds access from desktop devices, and not surprisingly, this has also been true of Twitter for some time. Given that, it could be that SAP are missing a trick here. It would be very useful if in the My Profile section of the app, customers could enter their social media details (Twitter account, Facebook, Google+ etc.), then the app could send them messages and alerts to their social network of choice, rather than customers having to log into the app to see alerts.

This is a fundamental tenet of good communications – talk to the customer on their platform of choice, don’t force them to come to you. Perhaps in version 2.0.

Of course, this mobile app will only be any good, if SAP can persuade their utility customers to deploy it – whether they can pull that off remains to be seen (but, I know I’d want my utility company to roll it out!).

Image credit Lady Madonna

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SAP TwoGo – ride-sharing software for the enterprise

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In a less than obvious move earlier this week, SAP launched a ride-sharing app called TwoGo.

Why less than obvious? Well, ride-sharing is generally perceived as more of a consumer focused activity, than an enterprise one. And SAP is very much an Enterprise software company.

iPhone Rideshare apps

A quick search for ride-share iPhone apps, for example returns 24 results, all of which are consumer software plays.

TwoGo is more than just a smartphone app though (it is available on most mobile platforms), TwoGo customers can also access it through its website, via email, via any iCal enabled calendar application, and even via SMS.

It is a single instance, multi-tenant cloud application. This is important because it means for any organisations deploying TwoGo, set-up on SAP’s side simply involves adding the organisations email domain to the customer table. Then employees are immediately enabled to create a TwoGo account by signing up with their work email address.

Also, because it is single-instance and multi-tenant, smaller companies can sign up and benefit from sharing rides with employees of other companies in the area who are also TwoGo subscribers.

And because TwoGo works with email, and iCal already, integration issues are minimal.

Why would an organisation want to deploy a ride-sharing app, you ask?
There are several good reasons –

  • if companies are subsidising travel for employees, ride-sharing reduces the number of trips taken by employees, thereby contributing directly to the organisation’s bottom line.
  • For organisations with vehicle fleets, this also reduces wear and tear, service and maintenance costs for vehicles.
  • Then there’s the issue of having to provide car parking spaces for employees – this is expensive and a poor use of the space. Reducing the number of cars coming to work, de-facto reduces the amount of car parking spaces an organisation needs to provide.
  • And, obviously, ride-sharing will also reduce the organisation’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Then there’s the more intangible benefits –

  • Employees spending more time together leads to serendipitous meetings – what was previously ‘dead time’ in the car can now be productive
  • And it brings employees closer to each other and to the company

What about employees though – what benefits can they get from ride-sharing?
Carpool lane sign

  • The obvious one is the ability to use carpool lanes on freeways where traffic often moves significantly faster
  • Also, according to the US Census Bureau, nearly 600,000 Americans have “mega-commutes” of at least 90 minutes and 50 miles each way to work. A significant number of those would benefit from ride-sharing because of reduced costs (fuel and automobile wear and tear) and also to share the driving load. Driving, especially in heavy traffic, is frustrating.
  • Then there’s the social benefits of meeting new people, making new friends and learning more about other job functions in your organisation.

TwoGo, although just now being released, has been in operation at SAP for 2 years now. It is at release number 4.5, so this is already a mature product. SAP themselves report that TwoGo has generated more than $5 million in value, reduced greenhouse gas emissions by eliminating 400,000 miles of driving, and matched employees into carpools more than 36,000 times, creating 2,200 additional days of networking time among employees.

The app is highly configurable and has clever algorithms which only offer a user a ride to work, if it can also offer him/her a ride home that evening, as well. And obviously, the app has block lists to ensure you are not repeatedly offered lifts with someone you’d rather avoid.

Given all the benefits of TwoGo, we have to wonder why other enterprise software vendors haven’t come up with a similar product before now. Or have they? Does TwoGo have an enterprise competitor we’re not aware of?

Carpool lane image credit Lady Madonna

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Mobile, the utility industries and beyond

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SmartPhone

It is hard to over-state the huge advances mobile devices have brought to companies in the last two years. We’ve featured a few examples here on GreenMonk in the past.

I was at the SAP for Utilities event in Copenhagen last week to moderate a panel and while there I happened to sit in on Rory Shaffer‘s talk on how mobile is impacting utility organisations, and it has been equally transformative there too!

Rory tells stories of how mobile apps and devices are helping the field work force reduce safety incidents, improve work quality, and shorten work cycles. For managers and executives, it allows them to see at their fingertips how their assets are performing, check customer trends and financial and regulatory exposure. Customers are also seeing new leaps forward in how they interact with their utilities thanks to mobile. Texas company CenterPoint Energy have a Mobile Outage Tracker app, for example available on both the Android and iOS platforms.

We are seeing a rise in the number of utilities with mobile portals for customers, faster resolution of issues thanks to mobile, and utilities starting to respond to their customers on the customers’ channels of choice (often Twitter or Facebook on customers’ mobile devices).

Rory cited some impressive outcomes from the rollout of mobile solutions by Pacific Gas and Electric. Their field worker productivity rose by 47% after the deployment because the new mobile solutions reduced their paper based workflow from twelve steps to five. Other advantages encountered included an increase in the average number of monthly work orders per employee from 43 to 87, substation inspection time reduced 80% from 2.5 hours to 20 minutes and reduced data entry time by an average 30 minutes per day.

Reductions in the number of steps by substituting with mobile also yields advantages like fewer data input errors, reduced paper use, and increased transparency across the organisation.

Most of these advantages achieved from the rollout of mobile applications are not unique to the utility industry, but are applicable to most industries across the board (particularly those with field service staff, it has to be said). The story of how mobile is changing enterprise is just starting out and if the efficiency gains of the last 24 months are any indication, we are in for exciting times ahead.

Image credit Tom Raftery

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IBM’s mobility play: MobileFirst

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Airplane mode on iPhone

One of the big talking points at this year’s IBM Pulse was IBM’s recent unveiling of its new platform for mobile, MobileFirst. My colleague James covers the announcement in details on his RedMonk blog, but I thought I’d talk a bit about the GreenMonk perspective, as we haven’t covered mobile here very much to-date, and it is becoming increasingly pervasive.

Mobile is now huge. I know this is self-evident, but it is totally game-changing. Now everyone is instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent, as IBM themselves might say.

What does this have to do with sustainability? Well, we here at GreenMonk take a broad view of Sustainability and as we noted in our write-up of the Pulse conference, IBM’s Smarter initiatives all play to a sustainable agenda. Sustainability is all about doing things more efficiently. Mobile definitely enables that.

You only have to think of the application IBM rolled out last year to help staff and students crowdsource cleaning up of the Los Angeles Unified School’s District. And, it is also making a big splash in the Enterprise space, as witnessed by SAP’s Operational Risk Management mobile app; the ESB and IBM mobile app to help finding and scheduling charging of electric vehicles in Ireland and many similar initiatives.

And there’s also social – I wrote a blog post last November about the intersection of big data, social and sustainability. What does this have to do with mobile? Well, in each of the examples outlined in the blog post, a significant amount of the data would have been entered via mobile. People as sensors. The internet of everything.

There are lots of other examples in healthcare, smarter cities (the Boston mobile app I mentioned in this post), education, etc.

The one place IBM may be missing a trick in mobile? Mobile endpoint energy management. IBM have an endpoint management app for mobile, but it’s focus is more on security than energy management, but, as we’ve noted here previously, battery life is a significant pain point for mobile users. A user whose device is out of battery, is a frustrated, disconnected, unproductive worker.

An Endpoint Management solution which manages mobile battery life (by having low power modes, or by automatically shutting down all but the frontmost app, or similar, for example) would be a definite win for any enterprise.

Full disclosure – IBM paid travel and accommodation for me to attend Pulse.