SAP Empowers Enterprise Developers With Leading Mobile Development Solutions

BARCELONA, Spain, Feb. 24, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Bolstering its commitment to an open partner and developer ecosystem, SAP America, Inc., a subsidiary of SAP AG (NYSE: SAP), today announced it is collaborating with Xamarin and Service2Media to provide developers with mobile app development frameworks that can efficiently and cost-effectively enable development on the company's market-leading* SAP® Mobile Platform. These mobile development environments are intended to allow enterprises to rapidly build rich and personalized mobile apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone devices from a single code-base. With built-in support for SAP Mobile Platform, businesses will gain easy, more secure access to on-premise and cloud-based data and processes from Xamarin and Service2Media's leading mobile development frameworks. The announcement was made at Mobile World Congress 2014, being held February 24-27 in Barcelona, Spain.

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It is estimated that there are more than 1.2 billion people accessing the Web from their mobile devices and 80 percent of mobile time is spent inside mobile apps.** This dramatic shift in mobile usage behavior is driving a massive increase in mobile workers that require widespread development of rich, easy-to-use mobile apps that are capable of accessing relevant information and enterprise processes via mobile devices.

Xamarin Extends SAP Mobile Platform and Applications to Vast Developer Community
With an extensive developer community representing more than 500,000 developers in 111 countries and a network of more than 150 consulting partners globally, Xamarin provides enterprises with the ability to rapidly build rich native mobile apps for iOS, Android and Windows 8 entirely from Microsoft's Visual Studio environment. This powerful, unique approach to mobile app development will now be extended by this new relationship with an enterprise-grade software developers kit (SDK) that will allow direct access to the on-premise and cloud versions of SAP Mobile Platform.

"Xamarin is the development platform of choice for mobile developers who create high-performance enterprise mobile applications," said Nat Friedman, CEO and co-founder, Xamarin. "We anticipate that our collaboration with SAP will make it significantly easier for developers to create rich compelling mobile applications that can leverage enterprise data and processes made available by SAP Mobile Platform."

"Microsoft has been working closely with both SAP and Xamarin, and we see this support for SAP Mobile Platform APIs as a benefit for the Microsoft developer community," said S.Somasegar, corporate vice president, Developer Division, Microsoft Corporation. "The ability to build enterprise-class applications across all major device platforms from within Visual Studio will help reduce the time and cost of mobile app development for developers working in a heterogeneous environment."

Initially, Xamarin and SAP will focus on the following initiatives:

• A newly released SDK that can enable developers to create native applications capable of more easily leveraging the rich functionality and enterprise data in SAP Mobile Platform
• A Xamarin Test Cloud with built-in SAP Mobile Platform data verification capabilities, designed to allow developers to perform more fully automated testing of mobile apps across hundreds of devices simultaneously
• A Xamarin certified consultant program available to Xamarin's 150 global consulting partners to help ensure efficient development of compelling apps using both Xamarin and SAP solutions
• An expanded Xamarin University program to include an expert led course for training enterprise developers to build Xamarin mobile apps that can connect to SAP Mobile Platform

Service2Media Brings Customers Proven Mobile Expertise for SAP systems
With nearly 10 years of experience developing mobile apps globally, Service2Media has expanded its App Lifecycle Platform M2Active™ to support SAP Mobile Platform APIs through a new connector module. M2Active now gives users a comprehensive set of tools, rapid workflows and cloud services to create iOS, Android and Windows apps that can access SAP systems. With a rich history in building consumer-facing applications, M2Active's built-in support for SAP Mobile Platform will allow customers to quickly create a compelling user experience to engage and grow their customer base while enabling them to take advantage of the security, application services and scalability of the platform.

"We anticipate that our relationship with SAP will ensure smooth integration of the data generated by SAP Mobile Platform directly into our software development tool chain," said Marcel E. Smit, CEO, Service2Media. "We can now carry our experience developing mobile consumer apps into the enterprise via one of the most flexible and comprehensive mobile enterprise application development platform in the industry. The combination of SAP and Service2Media can allow for the shortest time to market for user-friendly, feature-rich mobile enterprise apps for Service2Media's customers."

"Today's businesses are looking to mobilize a much broader set of enterprise apps and workflows through easy-to-use yet powerful native, hybrid and Web applications," said Bill Clark, global vice president, Mobile Strategy, SAP. "To meet this demand, we are constantly looking to expand SAP Mobile Platform through support from third-party software development frameworks that companies like Xamarin and Service2Media provide and by staying true to our open standards-based, bring-your-own-tools approach. Mobile app development sets the tone for mobile business and by engaging in this relationship SAP is able to extend its lead in providing end-to-end application life-cycle management for mobile while allowing developers – who have invested skills in development frameworks from Xamarin and Service2Media – to plug into the power and breadth of SAP technology."

For more information, including additional news from Mobile World Congress 2014, visit the SAP Newsroom and www.sap.com/mwc.

*SuperMonitoring, "State of mobile 2013 (infographic)," September 23, 2013
**Gartner "Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms" by Ian Finley, Van Baker, Ken Parmelee, David Mitchell Smith, Ray Valdes, Gordon Van Hulzen, August 7, 2013

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