Time flies - on 09. August 2006 - 10 years ago - msc mobile was founded. One of our first projects was to bring SAP onto Nokia phones like the E90 Communicator. This illustrates perfectly how the world has changed since then.
Back in 2006 and the following years we mainly implemented software on Windows and Windows Mobile devices. Mobile Asset Management, Mobile Time and Travel and Mobile Sales. These apps have been developed on SAPs first generation mobile platform Mobile Infrastructure/NetWeaver Mobile. A HTML/JSP based UI, the business logic in Java and compatible with Windows/Windows Mobile. We had to deal with devices with 8, 16 or at most 32 MB of RAM and a browser engine in the Pocket Internet Explorer that was less than slow. Our first msc mobile standard solutions MTL and MTE (Mobile Time and Mobile Travel) has been built on top of RCP and SWT. The dominant way to synchronize a mobile app was by putting the device into a cradle or plugging in a network cable (Wifi just slowly started coming up). And the term "App" did not even exist in 2006.
2009 we started to work on the first Blackberry projects, also something that does not play any roll today anymore. We came in touch with Sybase and their Sybase Unwired Platform and we started to develop our first iPhone and Android apps. We implemented Sales Plus in 2010 at Simba on SUP 1.5 and SAP acquired Sybase the same year. We developed our field service app MOMENTUM on a combination of NetWeaver Mobile 7.1 and SUP, we implemented it at customers in the Netherlands, and Switzerland.
2012 we started the world wide rollout of what became Travel Plus at a Swiss Pharma company. 30.000 users on a native iPad app and another 160.000 on the desktop (powered by HTML5).
Today in 2016 enterprise mobility is not a niche business anymore, it is mainstream. Everybody is expecting business processes to be available on devices like iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows. Nobody is thinking about network cables anymore, most laptops don't even have a Ethernet port at all and I am sitting in my garden in the sun and I am writing this on my iPad Pro with a 5G/LTE connection. Platform-independence has become more important than ever before. Apache Cordova and UI5 are many times the tools that we use to ensure that apps can run cross-platform. For offline apps we mainly use MobiLink with its unparalleled performance and reliability. These technologies are also the bases of SAM Smart Asset Management; the solution we are lounging for our 10th anniversary.
Windows Mobile, Nokia, Blackberry, Android, iOS - the technologies, programming languages and platforms have changed, but the customer requirements stayed the same - great usability, apps that are tailor made for their processes and high performance. I am sure that this will be the same for the next 10 years of our journey. 10 years msc mobile - many great experiences, a lot we have learned and achieved. Even with all the success we had I am sure that the best days are still ahead of us!