It's undeniable that Mobile Integration is one of the hot trends for the next years. Some people are comparing it to the ERP adoption wave back in the early 90's and the .com wave in the late 90's. Be it one or the other, having the capability to mobilize your business processes in an coherent and timely manner will be capital for any company to be successful in the 2010's. Heck, it'll be necessary for any company to survive in the 2010's (but that's my personal opinion, of course).
Foreseeing that, SAP started to evaluate (and finally invested in) a Mobile enablement strategy since a couple of years ago. One of the main outcomes of this strategy was the well covered and now finalized acquisition of Sybase Inc. With Sybase Mobility Suite, including solutions such as Sybase Unwired Platform (SUP) and Afaria, SAP has become able to support global companies in adopting a full-fletched end-to-end mobile experience, avoiding the major problems that companies that venture in this track usually suffer: multiple device platforms & data sources leading to exponential maintenance costs, lack of central monitoring & management tool for the devices etc.
While its clear that Sybase (and, in particular, SUP) has a major role in SAP Mobility strategy, it is also clear that it might not address all of the possible use cases SAP's customers might require, in particular when the idea is to quickly mobilize business processes that reside entirely on SAP backends. Using a full MEAP (Mobile Enterprise Application Platform) for that may be, at some times, overengineering a rather simple requirement.
To address that whitespace, SAP has come up with Project Gateway. You've probably heard about it before. It is a framework enabling people-centric applications consuming SAP Business Suite through popular devices and platforms in an easy, standards-based and non disruptive fashion.
Project Gateway main features are:
- Optimized for user interaction scenarios;
- Interacting with any SAP Business Suite version;
- Any Device, Any Experience, Any Platform;
- Simple APIs that require no SAP knowledge;
- Based on market standards: REST, ATOM/ODATA.
This and other information about Project Gateway were first introduced in this session on TechEd 2010, which is available free of charge in Virtual TechEd.
While the product addresses the problem from a solution availability perspective, from a service perspective, it's still required that SAP Ecosystem is properly enabled to support the customer projects that will pop-up once the product has been released to the market. And it was exactly to help SAP's partners to be enabled on providing, discovering and consuming RESTful services through Project Gateway that the SAP Global Co-Innovation Lab Network has come up with the 'Gateway Hands-on sessions' series of workshops for partners.
But the program consists on way more than just workshops. The idea is to provide a complete infrastructure that will enable the partners working either on mobility or web development to be able to prototype & test different scenarios with Project Gateway.
There are two different models of engagement, each with a specific offering to the partners.
Each of these two packages is associated to a specific fee. The workshops are open for both COIL members and partners who aren't members yet.
If you wish to obtain more information about the 'Gateway Hands-on sessions' for partners by COIL, reach out to coil@sap.com, or make your questions/give us your feedback in the Comments section below.
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