Thursday, July 3, 2003
SAP chooses Linux based PDA
Posted by Andy Sjostrom in "NEWS" @ 10:34 AM
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=581&ncid=581&e=3&u=/nm/20030703/tc_nm/tech_sap_sharp_dc
I've said it before and here we go again. Linux is well on its way into the mobile devices market. This time it is one of the big league players, business software maker SAP AG, that is about to tie their development and marketing with Sharp Zaurus devices running Linux. According to the article, "SAP aims to sign up five percent, or 1,000, of its current 20,000 corporate customers for its mobile business services by 2005". This number does not represent number of devices. Instead, one SAP customer can have many SAP users (salesmen, field technicians, production workers, warehouse workers etc) that all can be equipped with a mobile device and reach SAP from anywhere. Sharp officials believe that the SAP partnership can help them reach a "annual global sales of about 500,000 Zaurus PDAs for mobile enterprise customers". Last year Sharp shipped about 140,00 Zaurus PDAs in Japan.
SAP partners with each and every large system integrator. When large companies decide to make any or all of their information systems mobile, they typically turn to a system integrator. Microsoft has been very successful in getting system integrators to adopt Windows CE and Pocket PC through long term platform development and developer community support. SAP will undoubtedly get many system integrators to at least take a long good look at what Linux offers in this market. I am not saying that the partnership between SAP and Sharp will have a short term market impact or even that this endevour will be successful long term. But I am saying that more and more "signs" are saying that the fiercest platform competition will eventually be Symbian and Linux, and that Palm will find themselves between a rock and a hard place.
I've said it before and here we go again. Linux is well on its way into the mobile devices market. This time it is one of the big league players, business software maker SAP AG, that is about to tie their development and marketing with Sharp Zaurus devices running Linux. According to the article, "SAP aims to sign up five percent, or 1,000, of its current 20,000 corporate customers for its mobile business services by 2005". This number does not represent number of devices. Instead, one SAP customer can have many SAP users (salesmen, field technicians, production workers, warehouse workers etc) that all can be equipped with a mobile device and reach SAP from anywhere. Sharp officials believe that the SAP partnership can help them reach a "annual global sales of about 500,000 Zaurus PDAs for mobile enterprise customers". Last year Sharp shipped about 140,00 Zaurus PDAs in Japan.
SAP partners with each and every large system integrator. When large companies decide to make any or all of their information systems mobile, they typically turn to a system integrator. Microsoft has been very successful in getting system integrators to adopt Windows CE and Pocket PC through long term platform development and developer community support. SAP will undoubtedly get many system integrators to at least take a long good look at what Linux offers in this market. I am not saying that the partnership between SAP and Sharp will have a short term market impact or even that this endevour will be successful long term. But I am saying that more and more "signs" are saying that the fiercest platform competition will eventually be Symbian and Linux, and that Palm will find themselves between a rock and a hard place.
