The two sides of the same coin - mobile and cloud computing

Rick Costanzo, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Telecommunication Solutions and Mobility Solutions at SAP, put it in a nutshell at the beginning of the year:

"Two things are crucial for our customers and partners: they want to simplify their mobile business processes and create multi-channel, context-related mobile applications in the cloud as easily as possible.

The new services not only support our customers in redesigning their mobile business. They also help them to cope more easily with rapid technological change and emerging market trends such as augmented reality, the networked economy and the Internet of Things."

Work and leisure are increasingly merging. One in two working smartphone owners (48%) use their smartphone to take care of work-related matters during private meetings with family or friends.

28 percent work on business tasks from time to time. This is the result of a representative survey commissioned by the digital association Bitkom.

"Digitalization is making working life more flexible. Whereas you used to have to wait for an important message in the office with little productivity, today you simply take your office with you on your smartphone"

says Bitkom Managing Director Dr. Bernhard Rohleder.

Are mobile and cloud computing still an insider tip? The IT and telecommunications companies themselves remain pioneers in cloud use.

Seven out of ten ICT companies (71%) currently use cloud solutions, compared to 64% in the previous year. This puts ICT well above the average usage rate in the German economy of 44%.

Cloud usage in the automotive industry has increased by more than ten percentage points to currently 66% and in the logistics sector to 65%. This is one of the findings of the Cloud Monitor 2015, which was compiled by Bitkom Research on behalf of KPMG.

"The IT industry not only develops new technologies such as cloud solutions, but also uses them itself"

said Bitkom Vice President Achim Berg at the beginning of this year.

Banks (65%) and insurance companies (64%) follow in fourth and fifth place in the sector comparison; in the previous year, financial service providers were only at 56%.

The chemical and pharmaceutical industry is making a leap forward, with 62% of companies now using cloud technologies. In the retail and mechanical and plant engineering sectors, cloud usage is only rising very slowly to 45%.

In other sectors, the proportion of cloud users is 39%, compared to 35% in the previous year. According to the Bitkom survey, cloud computing is standard in large companies with 500 or more employees.

Here, 70 percent already use cloud solutions. In the SME sector, one in two (52%) companies do so, and the figure for companies with 20 to 99 employees is 41%.

"Cloud computing works"

summarizes Peter Heidkamp, Partner Consulting at KPMG.

Even if there are sometimes integration or security problems, after four years of the Cloud Monitor it can be said that, on the whole, cloud computing delivers what it promises: Cloud computing delivers what it promises.

"Concern about compliance violations is a major obstacle in the cloud market"

says Peter Heidkamp.

"Almost 60 percent of the companies surveyed are concerned that cloud computing jeopardizes compliance requirements. However, this concern is de facto rather unfounded:

Only eight percent of companies actually have compliance incidents related to their cloud solutions."

Mobile and cloud computing pose very different challenges for existing SAP customers, but at the end of the day they must be solved and synchronized, otherwise the added value of flexibility, speed and transparency will not be available.

The big challenge is to ensure that this new flexibility is neither at the expense of employees nor at the expense of companies, but that both sides benefit equally.

The latest version of the SAP Mobile Platform Software Development Kit (SDK) includes a programming interface that can be used to harmonize and simplify the development of online and offline applications.

New mobile operating systems such as iOS from Apple are also supported. SAP Web IDE offers an internet-based development environment based on the Hana Cloud platform. It enables developers to create and extend apps in SAP Fiori design.