RIM and SAP - Just What I Was Talking About

See, this is just what I meant in my recent entry on mobile applications. RIM and SAP have formed one of those all-too-common partnerships/alliances/whatever (a colleague of mine from long ago used to refer to these as the "rules of engagement") that basically puts SAP code on BlackBerrys. First question - why is the porting of an application such a big deal? Obviously as a hardware vendor, RIM would love to have as much code running on their handsets as possible. This is simply good business, especially if (a) the software vendor pays for the port and (b) no other competing vendor has that specific application. But what's in it for SAP? Sure, RIM is the leading mobile device vendor in the enterprise market, SAP sells enterprise software, this should work. But ports are expensive, and plenty of potential SAP users don't have or don't want BlackBerrys - they'd like to use their current handset or something else regardless. SAP thus cuts itself off from potential customers if it relies on porting code to specific handsets.

It should therefore be the mission of essentially every software vendor to be as independent of a given hardware platform as possible. All that is required to do this is a natural, common point of interface in the value chain between the instruction set and happy users. This used to be the API of an operating system, but, as I illustrated during my Platforms session at Interop, there are at least a dozen of these and ports of this form are expensive - thereby limiting the range of influence that a given application can have, and perhaps motivating - if not necessitating - such actions as the RIM/SAP alliance noted above. I can't imagine that this will ultimately be terribly cost effective, and, given the constant emphasis on the bottom line, something has to give.

Despite the current proliferation of Web-programming APIs (WPIs?), I have confidence that the write-once/run-anywhere model will ultimately prevail. It's only a matter of time until a common set of Web APIs and required services materializes. Given the availability of proxy-based mobile browsers (formerly known as Microbrowsers), we're most of the way to supporting essentially any application while mobile. And alliances may soon be a thing of the past.