SAP HANA Cloud Platform and SAP Mobile Platform

The Business Case for Mobile App

Development Platforms

2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

For Hybrid App Development

Table of Contents
4

In an Open Source World, Why Invest in a

Mobile Platform?

Buy Versus Build Becoming Buy Versus

Build and Borrow

Time and Cost Commitment:

Open Source Approach

Why Choose an MADP?

UI Design

Technical Architecture Design

Client UI Development

Login and Security Implementation

Data Modeling Implementation

Mobile Gateway Services

Logging and Operational Tracking

Data Provisioning, Offline and Sync

App Update

Development Operations

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

2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

2/13

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 sourcebased 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.

2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

3/13

In an Open Source World, Why Invest in a

Mobile Platform?
Gartner Inc. coined the term mobile enterprise
access platform (MEAP) in 2008. 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.

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.

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.

For some applications, that formula is enough.

Lets 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.

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.

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.

2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

4/13

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 doesnt 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.
Lets 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.
Well 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
doesnt 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 users identity must be authenticated
using the companys Active Directory user
base.
The app will track each field reps 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-Fionly 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).

2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

5/13

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 SourceBased Solution

Blended cost per person-day

US$800
No-Platform Time (Person-Days)

UI design

20

Technical architecture design

10

Client development: UI

40

Client development: login and security

10

Client development: data modeling

Server development: mobile gateway

30

Server development: logging

15

Client-server development: data provisioning,

offline and sync

80

Client-server development: app update

20

Development operations support

10

IT review: topology, security, and

monitoring setup

20

QA: functional testing

80

QA and stakeholder: acceptance testing

20

Total person-days

360

Total design, development, and

deployment costs

$288,000

2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

6/13

Why Choose an MADP?

An MADP reduces the cost and time requirements in almost every category. Lets 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 applications 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. Lets 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%.

2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

7/13

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
Mobiles 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.

2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

8/13

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. Weve 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 developers 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 applications 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%.

2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

9/13

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

Cloud
connector

HCPms

DMZ = Demilitarized zone or perimeter network

HCPms = SAP HANA Cloud Platform mobile services

2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

10/13

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. Well take a conservative position and say functional testing does
not offer an opportunity for platform versus
point-solution savings. Savings estimate: 0%.

of constructing and maintaining your own

integrated-by-hand mobile platform cobbled
together to create your solution. We wont 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.

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%.

Lets 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.

TIME AND COST SAVINGS:

PLATFORM APPROACH
The estimated cost for this project using an open
sourcebased 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 dont face the hidden extra costs

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.

2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

11/13

Time and Cost Estimate (Savings) of a Platform Approach

Blended cost per
person-day

US$800
No-Platform Time
(Person-Days)

Platform Savings
(%)

Platform Time
(Person-Days)

UI design

20

0%

20

Technical architecture design

10

25%

7.5

Client development: UI

40

0%

40

Client development:
login and security

10

50%

Client development:
data modeling

50%

2.5

Server development:
mobile gateway

30

50%

15

Server development: logging

15

90%

1.5

Client-server development:
data provisioning, offline
and sync

80

75%

20

Client-server development:
app update

20

90%

Development operations
support

10

25%

7.5

IT review: topology, security,

and monitoring setup

20

20%

16

QA: functional testing

80

0%

80

QA and stakeholder:
acceptance testing

20

0%

20

Total person-days

360

237

Total design, development,

and deployment costs

$288,000

$189,600

Cost savings (%)

34%

2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

12/13

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
www.sap.com/mobileplatform.

Studio SAP | 36702enUS (15/06) 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

13/13

 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or for any purpose without the
express permission of SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company.
SAP and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are
trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP SE (or an SAP affiliate company) in Germany and other
countries. Please see http://www.sap.com/corporate-en/legal/copyright/index.epx#trademark for
additional trademark information and notices. Some software products marketed by SAP SE and its
distributors contain proprietary software components of other software vendors.
National product specifications may vary.
These materials are provided by SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company for informational purposes only,
without representation or warranty of any kind, and SAP SE or its affiliated companies shall not be liable for
errors or omissions with respect to the materials. The only warranties for SAP SE or SAP affiliate company
products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements accompanying such
products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty.
In particular, SAP SE or its affiliated companies have no obligation to pursue any course of business
outlined in this document or any related presentation, or to develop or release any functionality mentioned
therein. This document, or any related presentation, and SAP SEs or its affiliated companies strategy
and possible future developments, products, and/or platform directions and functionality are all subject
to change and may be changed by SAP SE or its affiliated companies at any time for any reason without
notice. The information in this document is not a commitment, promise, or legal obligation to deliver
any material, code, or functionality. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and
uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. Readers are cautioned
not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates, and
they should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions.