Another inflection point
Last week SAP hosted a 31 hour code-a-thon referred to as the SAP Mobility InnoJam. The event included 24 developers from 12 customers and partners, all of whom are front and center in moving their companies towards widespread adoption of mobility via the Sybase Unwired Platform. If you want the blow by blow detail, you can get the skinny from Stan Stadelman’s blog, found here. The point I want to make is not about the specific applications that were developed in a matter of hours (not months or weeks—hours), but more importantly, the scope of the participation and what it implies. Participation covered several industries, and included companies such as Nvidia, Hewlett Packard, eBay, Genentech, Intel, Applied Materials as well as several others. This event provided not only breadth of participation across a range of verticals, it was also populated by companies that are dominating their specific industries, and that dominance is about to go turbo.
Why?
The implications of what they just did. Applications development (whether waterfall or agile) is something that is traditionally measured by quarterly-based deliverables (in Q3 we will have this release(s), with these features, etc.). That whole model just got turned on its head by the introduction of the Hybrid Web Container (part of the Sybase Unwired Platform), which was the development framework for the InnoJam.
There are incremental technology improvements, then there are products that create an inflection point for an entire industry. One of the gating factors for mobile application development has been the need for device specific development skill sets. If you want to build apps on an iPhone, you need to know Objective C, as well as xCode. If you also want to develop on an Android device, you need to start completely over in terms of your development skill set. This is an adequate development model, but it puts steep limits on the available talent pool for mobile device development. On the other hand, you have this vast ecosystem of web developers (outnumbering device developers 10 to 1), who have been watching the mobility juggernaut pass them by.
Not anymore.
The core value of the Hybrid Web Container is that it allows web developers to build mobile device applications that look and feel like a “native” application. By using an HTML/ Javascript/CSS “container” architecture, Sybase has brought industry standards to what had previously been a (nearly) proprietary model for apps development. Or put less technically, you can now use web developers to build mobile applications that look and feel like they were built specifically for an iPhone or Android device. Or put even less technically, the potential development pool of programmers who can build mobile apps has just gone up by a factor of 10.
Mobile technology, perhaps more than any other type of technology, is driven by the compelling nature of the application being accessed. As cool as iPhones are, people buy then to get access to the apps, not to make phone calls. The compelling event is the app, not the device. With this new capability, Sybase has not only shortened the development cycle by a huge margin, we’ve also opened the floodgates to a vast increase in mobilized applications, which will in turn drive broader and faster adoption of mobility across the enterprise and their associated supply chains.