Looking to reaffirm its commitment to embrace the best choice for customers with an open partner and developer ecosystem, SAP has announced agreements with Adobe, Appcelerator and Sencha to provide its customers with an open mobile apps development framework for efficiently and cost-effectively developing on the company's mobile platform. This follows SAP's other announcement that it has agreed to acquire mobile application vendor Syclo.

By collaborating with these three mobile platform players SAP will enable potentially hundreds of thousands of developers to effectively build mobile apps based on their choice of client architectures - from native to hybrid Web container to mobile Web.  Developers will be able to do so while leveraging SAP's own enterprise mobile application platform.
 

"As a leader in the enterprise mobility market, SAP is constantly looking for innovative ways to serve our customers and partners, and advance our vision for this market," said Sanjay Poonen, president, Global Solutions, SAP. "By joining forces with leading mobile app development vendors like Adobe, Appcelerator and Sencha, we are making it easier for large communities of developers to innovate on our platform. SAP, customers, partners and the entire ecosystem now have a tremendous opportunity to rapidly produce millions of high quality apps using the tool of their choice."
 

Adobe: PhoneGap
 

PhoneGap is a popular hybrid Web app runtime environment that allows developers to author native mobile applications with Web technologies such as HTML5. Applications built with PhoneGap have access to native device APIs and can be published across all major app stores. PhoneGap enables developers to create innovative mobile apps that combine native and Web functionality. The SAP mobile platform complements PhoneGap with mobile enterprise application platform capabilities that extend the PhoneGap mobile app ecosystem to the enterprise.
 

Appcelerator: Titanium Development Platform
 

Appcelerator's Titanium is an Eclipse-based IDE, SDK and library of connectors used to rapidly build, test and deploy mobile, desktop and Web applications. For mobile development, Titanium Studio provides a framework to develop rich application experiences, and connect those apps to SAP and 220 other data sources. Titanium SDK enables the enterprise to deploy native, hybrid and mobile Web apps all from a single JavaScript code base. Appcelerator's 300,000 mobile developers will soon be able to integrate SAP data into their mobile apps through a single, integrated environment.
 

Sencha: Touch
 

Sencha Touch is a high-performance HTML5 mobile application framework and the cornerstone of the Sencha HTML5 platform. Built for enabling world-class user experiences, Sencha Touch 2's HTML5 framework enables developers to build fast and responsive apps that work on iOS, Android, Blackberry, Kindle Fire and more. Ready for the enterprise, Sencha Touch includes built-in capabilities that make it easy to build applications that align with business architectures. Rich interactive HTML5 charting, and newly delivered support for the oData protocol allows developers using Sencha Touch and SAP to quickly build enterprise class applications that mobilize their data assets cost effectively.
 

"To create innovative mobile apps, every company must leverage the creativity and capabilities of in-house developers and the enormous number of mobile developers in the wider mobile ecosystem," Poonen further notes. "With our Mobile 2.0 strategy, we are opening up our unified platform to capture as much innovation as possible in the mobile world. This advances our vision to bring consumer grade usability and innovation to both already unwired businesses and those that are now getting started."
 

"We are seeing rapid innovation in the mobile market, especially in application development environments, frameworks and methodologies," adds Stephen Drake, program vice president, Mobility and Telecom, IDC. “It is critical for enterprise mobile applications platforms to support popular mobile application development environments and leverage the skills of millions of mobile apps developers using these environments. This approach will provide buyers of these enterprise mobile application platforms with the flexibility required to implement a best-fit mobile strategy and future proof their investments."