“CUPERTINO, California and WALLDORF, Germany — May 5, 2016 — Apple® and SAP today announced a partnership to revolutionize the mobile work experience for enterprise customers of all sizes, combining powerful native apps for iPhone® and iPad® with the cutting-edge capabilities of the SAP HANA platform. This joint effort will also deliver a new iOS software development kit (SDK) and training academy so that developers, partners and customers can easily build native iOS apps tailored to their business needs.”

Is this a culture shock ?

Looking at the picture of Cook and McDermott above you may be inclined to believe it but not really not anymore .. both companies have moved closer together the last few years.

SAP has greatly improved its usability with technologies such as SAP Fiori and its various cloud solutions as its center of gravity progressively shifted from Walldorf to Palo Alto under McDermott’s leadership, German industrial rigor somewhat superseded by Silicon valley marketing and design.

Apple on the other hand has increasingly become mainstream since the premature death of Jobs and due to the more traditional approach of Cook which has centered on leveraging the existing product portfolio rather then bank on disruptive change ( the SAP deal being a case in point ).

From a technology standpoint note that it is already possible to design and build mobile applications running SAP on Apple devices ( SAP Fiori web apps, Hybrid or Native iOS set ups ) however we do confirm that Hybrid solutions can be hard to deploy on iOS. Presumably the iOS SDK will make it easier to develop, we also expect that it will allow applications to be designed and built according to the SAP Fiori UI principles which increasingly powers all SAP solutions.

For more information about this topic or Fiori & Mobile SAP Apps please send us a mail at fiori@roitech.biz