RIM and SAP to change the way people work

A recent innovation announced by RIM and SAP inspired me..
Following the footsteps of Duet alliance with Microsoft, SAP has now embarked into a partnership with RIM BlackBerry. The idea of this innovation is to enable anywhere mobile access to SAP enterprise applications through widely adopted BlackBerry Platform. This initiative tears down the walls between mobile connectivity and enterprise applications. At the same time, it brings in lot of assurance to the solutions in terms of communication, security and management.
The first output expected out of this partnership is a "native" BlackBerry client application that will merge the power of SAP CRM application. The wonder doesn't end there. It will also enable merging the SAP CRM applications with the core BlackBerry smartphone applications such as mail, Address Book, and Calender applications. What a "mashup" of applications from two different platforms?
This partnership simply makes the "middleware" layer irrelevant if someone wants to integrate RIM and SAP platforms. And that is a significant benefit to IT shops!
From this instance, I derive if two product vendors can collaborate, they can bring out innovative set of solutions to the end-customers which will make their life easy.
I have seen the 'Duet' demo in SAP TechEd event couple of years ago. And I was impressed.
Am sure this RIM offering will be very useful as well.
I am waiting to see this kind of partnership happening in the middleware/SOA space as well.
Will we see a similar announcement from IBM and SAP where we will be able to host SAP's Enterprise Service repository in IBM middleware and able to seamlessly connect to SAP without adapters?.

Enterprise Mobility - A Myth?

There is lot of buzz around Mobility these days - iPhone, Skype, WiMax and Smart Phones.

But, Are we really ready for power applications on the mobile?. Not yet.

There are two key reasons that are inhibiting the surge of mobile apps:

1. The platform is inherently limited in features. Beyond, J2ME, if one has to develop powerful applications, they have to adapt the native platforms that are specific to the devices. This limits the developer community and the portability of apps.

2. The technology is maturing. Rich Internet Apps/Flash support are still awaited on popular platforms such as BlackBerry.

3. Expensive. If one has to write a 'connected' app on mobile, it has to go thru carriers and utilize the bandwidth. This is not so easy and the bandwidth is not so cheap to consume. So, the spread of connected applications is still limited.

4. Most of the mobility apps consumers are field workers or senior management teams. The senior management people are not 'power' users, in the sense, they dont use anything beyond email. The field workers, except, white collar, are still waiting to get access to those devices in work.

Having many such limitations, we dont know what we are missing today in the mobility world.

However, things are changing and maturing slowly....

With Google working on Android platform with Open Handset alliance, there may be a new 'killer' application waiting to explode. If Google can crack it, that could be the tipping point for Enterprise Mobility....

So, Enterprises....keep watching Android...