Global CIO: How SAP Is Leading The Mobile-Enterprise RevolutionGlobal CIO: How SAP Is Leading The Mobile-Enterprise Revolution

"The promise here is that real-time mobility lets executives start to manage their business differently, moving away from static models like red/yellow/green dashboards, and moving away from management by exception and letting the software do the work.

"The convergence of mobility and real-time will create new categories of business applications," McDermott added, "unlocking the value of major investments in the enterprise and doing so without disruption. . . . CEOs want to make decisions on the fly, and they will expect full transparency in real time."

That's a pretty tall order for any company—and while SAP feels it's doing its part, it also realizes it will need to harness the immense resources and imaginations and innovation of independent developers and gizmo-makers from across the globe. And that's why the mobile-driven changes Mecker is leading in his Ecosystem & Partner Group are so critical to generating the momentum to accelerate this revolution far beyond what just SAP and Sybase can do.

"There is no question that mobility is driving the evolution of the SAP ecosystem," Mecker said in an interview at Sapphire. In the past, he said, the ecosystem for a big software company like SAP would be fairly straightforward: a few hardware companies, a few services companies, and that was about it.

But no more.

"Now, we need content providers in our ecosystem, and cloud operators, and mobile service providers, and widget developers and app developers, with many of those last coming from guys in their garages," Mecker said.

On top of that, SAP's ecosystem requirements for customers in high-growth and highly mobile countries such as China and Brazil and India will be markedly different from its needs in mature markets such as the U.S. and Europe. As a result, his team is looking at the mobile ecosystem in two extensions: one axis for mobile capabilities to be used in conjunction with SAP's on-premise and on-demand solutions and technologies, and a second axis that takes into account "the geographic element of specialized requirements by country."

And Kevin Nix, who joined SAP a year ago when it acquired his mobile-enterprise startup and now serves as senior VP for business solutions and technology, said that his newly formed mobile team (less than 6 weeks old) is focused on the idea of showing "instant value" to prove the potential of mobile in helping customers remake processes, workflow, and how they view growth opportunities.

"We need to make it really easy for our customers, big and small, to reach into the SAP EcoHub and find the perfect partner," Nix said. "We have to keep working and working to make consumption of SAP content easier—you're seeing that with Business ByDesign, with Business Objects, and down the line you'll see it with Business Suite.

"And for our customers, that presents a huge opportunity."

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