The Business Case for Mobile App Development Platforms For Hybrid App Development

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1 SAP HANA Cloud Platform and SAP Mobile Platform The Business Case for Mobile App Development Platforms For Hybrid App Development

2 Table of Contents 4 In an Open Source World, Why Invest in a Mobile Platform? 4 Buy Versus Build Becoming Buy Versus Build and Borrow 6 Time and Cost Commitment: Open Source Approach 7 Why Choose an MADP? 7 UI Design 7 Technical Architecture Design 7 Client UI Development 8 Login and Security Implementation 8 Data Modeling Implementation 8 Mobile Gateway Services 8 Logging and Operational Tracking 9 Data Provisioning, Offline and Sync 9 App Update 9 Development Operations 9 IT Review Process 11 QA: Functional Testing 11 QA: Acceptance Testing 11 Time and Cost Savings: Platform Approach 13 A Strong Case for Mobile App Development Platforms 13 Learn More 2 / 13

3 Is building your own mobile infrastructure with open source software appealing? Resist the temptation. A mobile app development platform saves you more time and money than building your own open source based point solution. Many mobile business segments, including app development, have reached tipping points. For example, wearable technologies are now used for displays and gestures, and the demand for multichannel access has increased. The number of use cases for mobile has grown, and the supply of experienced developers lags behind the demand. All these emphasize the need for an efficient, cost-effective development strategy. SAP has implemented a number of innovations to simplify and streamline the mobile app development process. This paper compares the open source approach to hybrid app development with a platform-based approach showing savings of 30% or more. Because the scope of features and services is so wide, a mobile app platform brings both cost and time savings to every development project. 3 / 13

4 In an Open Source World, Why Invest in a Mobile Platform? Gartner Inc. coined the term mobile enterprise access platform (MEAP) in Those initial mobile platforms were monolithic commercial software systems covering everything from data integration to client data synchronization and even user interface development. Plus, almost every platform offering was proprietary in its construction. The term mobile application development platform (MADP) popped up a couple of years later when MEAP added cross-platform development from a single code base. MADPs addressed complex mobile problems but lacked openness. Their approach to solving offline data provisioning and synchronization problems was typically proprietary and complicated. That was then and this is now, where the world is much more mobile, and mobile open source framework projects are almost too numerous to count. 1 Developers use integrated development environments and frameworks readily available to help them create applications more quickly. With development tools and kits offered at a minimal cost, does it make sense to invest in an MEAP or MADP platform? In a word: Yes. BUY VERSUS BUILD BECOMING BUY VERSUS BUILD AND BORROW Many open source mobile components are readily available, but the key word is many. You always need more than one. The classic buyversus-build decision now includes assimilating one or more open source packages. Buy versus build has become buy versus build and borrow. For some applications, that formula is enough. Let s say you need to build an online application that runs on multiple-device operating systems. You could use a write once, run many open source application container such as Apache Cordova and build the user interface from an open source UI framework such as Sencha Touch or OpenUI5. Great, you say. But hold on. That covers the device frameworks, and you need Representational State Transfer (REST) and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) services frameworks to support it. If you are a Windows shop, you might use Microsoft.NET services to build Open Data Protocol (OData) Web services. In an SAP world, you might rely on SAP Gateway technology. Java open tooling also provides many options. 1. Too numerous to count is hyperbole. One can count them, and we did: As of this writing, Github had 46,264 source code repositories related to mobile and 1,320 that matched the search phrase mobile framework. SourceForge had 752 projects that were categorized as mobile and marked as recently updated. Conclusion: There is no shortage of mobile open source software available. 4 / 13

5 With development tools and kits offered at a minimal cost, does it make sense to invest in an MEAP or MADP platform? In a word: Yes. For the simplest cases, that could be your complete solution. This example is specifically described as an online application because the app works only when the device has a live data connection to the application services. It also doesn t address operations support: How will the services be secured and integrated into the enterprise identity management? How will system usage be tracked? How much time will be spent debugging runtime issues that arise? For these mobile app development requirements, you need more open source components. An MADP handles all these development needs. Because the scope of features and services is so wide, a mobile app platform brings both cost and time savings to every development project. Let s take an in-depth look at the costs of a typical mobile app development project and the savings that arise from using a platform to build a hybrid app. We ll break the time spent on projects into separate categories and explore the savings for each. Quantifying the savings objectively is difficult. We could build an application with and without using a platform and compare the time spent, but that doesn t accurately reflect the nature and hot spots that vary within each specific project. In that comparison, those precise results would be applicable only to projects similar to that type. Instead, we will evaluate a common businessto-enterprise (B2E) use case. The project is a simple order tracking and product catalog application designed for sales staff to use in the field, and the team has a set of requirements: The app must run on existing company-supplied Apple and Samsung tablets. Each user s identity must be authenticated using the company s Active Directory user base. The app will track each field rep s store visit activity, so it must maintain a list of planned daily visits. The rep will update each visit with call notes during the day. The tablets are the Wi-Fi only version, so the app must operate throughout the day without depending on an active Wi-Fi connection. The reps are expected to refresh all data at the beginning and end of each day from a Wi-Fi connected area (home, office, or public). 5 / 13

6 TIME AND COST COMMITMENT: OPEN SOURCE APPROACH How much time is needed to complete this project using a point solution built by your own team, perhaps with an assist from simple, purposespecific open source or device frameworks? The table shows the estimated costs for the hypothetical project. Time and Cost Estimate for an Open Source Based Solution Blended cost per person-day UI design 20 Technical architecture design 10 Client development: UI 40 Client development: login and security 10 Client development: data modeling 5 Server development: mobile gateway 30 Server development: logging 15 Client-server development: data provisioning, offline and sync Client-server development: app update 20 Development operations support 10 IT review: topology, security, and monitoring setup US$800 No-Platform Time (Person-Days) 80 QA: functional testing 80 QA and stakeholder: acceptance testing 20 Total person-days 360 Total design, development, and deployment costs 20 $288,000 6 / 13

7 Why Choose an MADP? An MADP reduces the cost and time requirements in almost every category. Let s look at the time savings and advantages that SAP HANA Cloud Platform and SAP Mobile Platform bring to each development phase. The two SAP offerings (one cloud and one onpremise solution) share a common software development kit, or SDK. For context, here are some brief product descriptions: SAP HANA Cloud Platform mobile services: This complete mobile platform as a service, or mpaas, lets you deploy and manage native, hybrid apps with services for offline data access, app update, remote logging control, push notifications, and more. SAP HANA Cloud Platform runs on an SAP-owned and -operated cloud infrastructure. The mobile services can be combined with other application services (analytics, collaboration, security, portal, and integration), as well as database services (transactions, analytics, prediction, streaming, special, and text mining). Thus, you can build small-scale or massive apps that connect to the cloud or to your on-premise back-end software systems. SAP Mobile Platform: This on-premise offering lets you deploy and manage native, hybrid, mobile Web, metadata-driven, and SMS-based apps. SAP Mobile Platform provides the same services as SAP HANA Cloud Platform mobile services and includes components to mash up multiple back-end protocols into a single OData service. The following sections describe the time savings in relation to SAP HANA Cloud Platform and SAP Mobile Platform. UI DESIGN Designing an application s appearance, layout, and user experience is often done separately from the actual development. The look, feel, and flow of the application often require detailed input and feedback with the business stakeholders or the product owner. Design experts frequently lead this process. Many software tools can assist in UI design, and they are generally considered outside of a traditional mobile platform. An MADP has no role in UI design, so the time savings is zero. Savings estimate: 0%. TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE DESIGN SAP Mobile Platform provides a template to standardize your mobile technical architecture. Tool choices related to server architecture, clustering architecture, DMZ proxy and relay architecture, and so on are determined ahead of time and documented within SAP Mobile Platform. Savings estimate: 25%. CLIENT UI DEVELOPMENT Client UI development time is primarily determined by the number of device operating systems that the application must support and whether you are using a hybrid ( write once, run many ) or native development approach. For this use case, assume a small application in terms of screen count (10, excluding screens supporting authentication). For estimation purposes, assume it will take 5 person-days per screen using open source tools. Let s be pessimistic in the savings estimate here and assume that the hybrid development tooling with SAP software is equivalent to pure open source tooling. Savings estimate: 0%. 7 / 13

8 LOGIN AND SECURITY IMPLEMENTATION Developers often overlook the time investment needed to implement a secure authentication user interface in a mobile application. The UI and system interaction surrounding necessary corner cases such as failed retry management, password reset, and so on are important and time-consuming to implement. The SAP offerings provide this functionality for native, hybrid, and metadata-driven app architectures. Savings estimate: 50%. DATA MODELING IMPLEMENTATION Most modern UI frameworks open source or otherwise adhere to standardized software development design patterns. 2 That standardization reduces development time, but it still needs to be done. SAP HANA Cloud Platform mobile services and SAP Mobile Platform add capabilities to streamline this implementation step. The OData services framework, supported by SAP Mobile Platform, includes metadata modeling, which saves time, and OData empowers the application developer to optimize each data request without chasing down the services development team. Savings estimate: 50%. MOBILE GATEWAY SERVICES Most contemporary mobile apps access backend systems through RESTful Web services. SAP has standardized on the OASIS-endorsed OData protocol, which can be thought of as extensions to REST. SAP Mobile Platform provides tools that expose and secure existing OData Web services or that create OData services from Java JDBC or JPA data sources, or SOAP Web services, lending substantial savings to this implementation task. Use SAP HANA Cloud Platform mobile services along with SAP HANA Cloud Integration technology to integrate with other back ends. Savings estimate: 50%. LOGGING AND OPERATIONAL TRACKING Mobile s distributed nature makes it difficult to identify and resolve problems for thousands of devices in thousands of locations. You want analytics and reports that identify usage patterns for each mobile app. Systems administrators, for example, want to review errors on a device. You can address these requirements from a combination of stock packages and custom code, but both SAP offerings readily provide this capability. Savings estimate: 90%. 2. The model-view-controller (MVC) pattern is probably the most popular of these for user interface development. The SAPUI5 and OpenUI5 frameworks are both based on the MVC pattern. 8 / 13

9 SAP HANA Cloud Platform mobile services let you deploy and manage native, hybrid apps with services for offline data access, app update, remote logging control, push notifications, and more. DATA PROVISIONING, OFFLINE AND SYNC Your simplest applications can be limited to online use only, but you would be surprised how often mobile apps need to support at least limited offline operation. Even basic offline use cases require inordinate amounts of development and test time. 3 Consider the more complex case that we have in our sample application: a catalog of tens of thousands of records needing to be distributed reliably to a community of a few thousand devices. You need to construct business rules around what data needs to be transmitted to devices. The number of devices makes it foolhardy to transmit fresh updates to all devices at once, so you need an efficient mechanism to control that process. Addressing this requirement requires a server and client components to support data modeling, data integration distribution services, and crossplatform event notifications. All these capabilities are available in both SAP offerings. Savings estimate: 75%. 3. A typical offline use case might require the application to display the last results obtained from the server. That list must be available even if the application is stopped or the device is rebooted. Supporting this seemingly simple case requires persistent caching of the data, which leads to the need to encrypt the persistent data storage. Although SDKs of native device operating systems provide the building blocks to construct this, quite a bit of work is involved. SAP Mobile Platform has client SDKs that address all these needs. APP UPDATE Keeping enterprise mobile apps up-to-date is simpler with a platform that supports app updating. SAP Mobile Platform has this important feature. Consumer app stores, including the Apple App Store and Google Play, impose specific app update control rules, which greatly reduce the savings possible in this category for businessto-consumer apps you might create. Our use case is a hybrid app, so you can manage app updates through the administration console in both SAP offerings. Savings estimate: 90%. DEVELOPMENT OPERATIONS Someone on your development team or from your IT staff is responsible for designing, building, and maintaining the systems that support your application development. We ve estimated 10 persondays as the nonplatform cost over the life of the project, but this nonplatform cost can easily trend higher, depending on the number of tools used in development. The SDK for SAP Mobile Platform provides convenient development SDK installers to configure each developer s machine for work. Both SAP offerings also integrate into standard development tools for software configurations management and continuous integration. Savings estimate: 25%. IT REVIEW PROCESS IT departments often insist on a security review of an application s architecture prior to deployment. Because many of the features of the SAP offerings revolve around communications and data security, this conversation can be shortened considerably. The figure shows typical security boundaries. Savings estimate: 20%. 9 / 13

10 Figure: Security Boundaries Supported by Mobile App Development Platforms from SAP External DMZ LAN Reverse proxy (optional) SAP Mobile Platform Back-end system(s) Authentication provider HCPms Cloud connector DMZ = Demilitarized zone or perimeter network HCPms = SAP HANA Cloud Platform mobile services 10 / 13

11 SAP Mobile Platform provides the same services as SAP HANA Cloud Platform mobile services and includes components to mash up multiple back-end protocols into a single OData service. QA: FUNCTIONAL TESTING The quality assurance staff usually organizes and supervises functional testing. We ll take a conservative position and say functional testing does not offer an opportunity for platform versus point-solution savings. Savings estimate: 0%. QA: ACCEPTANCE TESTING Your quality assurance process probably requires application acceptance testing prior to product release. Acceptance testing generally involves manual testing and a review of the application by nontechnical users. A platform approach generally does not open many opportunities for time savings on this task. Savings estimate: 0%. TIME AND COST SAVINGS: PLATFORM APPROACH The estimated cost for this project using an open source based solution comes to US$288,000. Tallying the estimated savings from all these categories, the total for this project using the SAP offerings is roughly $189,600. That represents an estimated savings of well over 30% (see the table). Keep in mind that these savings are for the first project only. If your company builds multiple apps over time, these savings repeat themselves. Moreover, you don t face the hidden extra costs of constructing and maintaining your own integrated-by-hand mobile platform cobbled together to create your solution. We won t try to estimate those here, but it should be apparent that you can gain good savings by avoiding the maintenance of a complex tool chain. Let s look at one more important benefit: your team has more time to completely focus on and understand your business problems and to concentrate on the business value of your applications. As mentioned earlier, successful implementations of offline data access require careful design and testing to ensure a scalable and errorfree system. Security needs such as multiple authentication methods, storage of credentials, and data encryption also require a significant investment in specialized developers. Many of the technical details that might distract them from the business are built into the platform. As your team understands your business better, the solution becomes more valuable. This sample B2E application use case illustrates the savings possible for a platform-oriented mobile development approach. You can apply this model to your own use cases to explore the value specific to your business. 11 / 13

12 Time and Cost Estimate (Savings) of a Platform Approach Blended cost per person-day US$800 No-Platform Time (Person-Days) Platform Savings (%) UI design 20 0% 20 Technical architecture design 10 25% 7.5 Client development: UI 40 0% 40 Client development: login and security Client development: data modeling Server development: mobile gateway 10 50% % % 15 Server development: logging 15 90% 1.5 Client-server development: data provisioning, offline and sync Client-server development: app update Development operations support IT review: topology, security, and monitoring setup 80 75% % % % 16 QA: functional testing 80 0% 80 QA and stakeholder: acceptance testing 20 0% 20 Total person-days Total design, development, and deployment costs Cost savings (%) 34% Platform Time (Person-Days) $288,000 $189, / 13

13 A STRONG CASE FOR MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT PLATFORMS As you advance enterprise mobility within your organization, you are sure to face defenders of a point solution and advocates of mobile app platforms. You can build a point solution with free, open source software, but like any do-it-yourself project, it has lots of hidden costs. This sideby-side comparison sets the stage for an intelligent discussion of the pros and cons, plus reveals the costs of relying too much on open source software. The numbers presented here make a strong argument for investing in a mobile app development platform and realizing a return on investment that prepares your organization for long-term mobile success. LEARN MORE To find out more about mobile application development platforms, call your SAP representative or visit us on the Web at 13 / 13 Studio SAP 36702enUS (15/06)

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