IteS: Creating Mobile Mindset

At SAP India, the challenge was to enable consumer devices with an enterprise set-up to offer productive real-time applications to employees on the move. The last two years have been an exciting journey as the company internally embraced major technological changes-big data, cloud computing, business intelligence, and particularly consumerization of IT.

The objective was to use IT at a strategic level for business enablement and also as a strategic function that would showcase our businesses and also serve as a reference point for our customers," says Anil Khatri, head (South Asia), global IT-client technology and field IT, SAP India.

Consuming IT

In fact, consumerism of IT was not an alien concept for SAP, it being one of the early adopters. The theme was SAP runs SAP' story. Globally, SAP currently runs around 14,000 iPads, 8,000 iPhones, and around 20,000 BlackBerry phones. The Indian story too is not very different from the global picture. Currently, SAP India internally is running 1,200 BlackBerry phones, 600 iPads, and 200 iPhones. To manage all of these devices, which obviously is a dynamically changing number, was tough.

Khatri goes on to elaborate, "We have a product called Afaria which was acquired with the Sybase integration. Afaria is the industry's leading mobile device management and security solution for the enterprise. Afaria provides you with a single administrative console to centrally manage, secure, and deploy mobile data, applications, and devices. It helps to manage multiple mobile devices, giving us a vital and critical tool to think of enterprise mobility."

The objective was to empower the sales and marketing teams with data anytime, anywhere. For Khatri, the hurdle was to create the mobile mindset in the employees but at the same time be device-agnostic. A mobility device gives the sales force the power in their hands to do business in real-time.

The Rollout

Another major issue for Khatri and his team was mapping these consumer-centric devices to an enterprise network. "Before this no one has ever experimented with these devices to be used in enterprises like sourcing patch updates (which had to be sourced from the manufacturers) which were required when these were being imbibed in a corporate set-up," says Khatri.

Having started in late 2010, the company took it up in an aggressive manner only in 2011 by pushing for this. The customer-facing teams were also opened up for doing approvals on the fly, access CRM database, and also key in the upcoming business opportunities. "The teams can also do customized demos for the customer, do office productive work like drafting and sending mails and granting approvals for travel requests, bill payments, etc," adds Khatri.

No Compromises with Security

Khatri emphasizes that despite all of this, security was never compromised. "We ensured that all this was done in a secured fashion," says Khatri.

The company has stringent security policies in place. "We have password policies like the PGP-a security software-which is installed on these devices for mail encryption."

In case the device gets lost or stolen, the device can be locked and remotely wipe out all data. Encouraged by the response that the initiative has generated, Khatri obviously will be embracing more devices, but in a controlled manner. Hence he and his team are working with manufacturers and the focus is to enable more productive applications. Khatri envisions a day when the laptop will be replaced by a mobile device.