Recently, SAP announced an exciting partnership with Apple to drive stronger co-innovation in enterprise mobile apps.

The companies are working to transform the mobile work experience for enterprise customers of all sizes, combining powerful native apps for iPhone and iPad backed by the powerful capabilities of SAP HANA.

As mobility in the workplace continues to expand, with the entire nervous system of the IT landscape going digital, data-driven cloud apps are quickly becoming the dominant interface. In some industries, the demand and growth for mobility is already very high. These industries are early adopters and are in the midst of transforming into a fully digital enterprise.

As the IT landscape goes digital, data-driven cloud apps are quickly becoming the dominant interface.

With this in mind, SAP plans to first introduce native iOS apps for businesses in retail, healthcare, asset-intensive industries, and professional services. Analyzing our customers’ input and feedback, Apple and SAP will continuously work together to identify new focus industries and lines of business to deliver customized software tools and training so developers, partners, and customers can easily build native iOS apps tailored to their business needs.

The key is simplicity and ease-of-use. According to Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, “This partnership will transform how iPhone and iPad are used in enterprise by bringing together the innovation and security of iOS with SAP’s deep expertise in business software.” Further inspiring the revolution of work, SAP’s CEO Bill McDermott said, “In giving people an agile and intuitive business experience, we empower them to know more, care more, and do more.”

Mapping the Digital Journey

Completely digitizing your business includes stages that vary in complexity, from going paperless to optimization and transformation. We have strategically partnered with many of our customers to start the digitization process. Through our collaborative efforts, we have identified the first of a series of uniquely customized apps that are optimizing key roles in various industries. These mobile apps demonstrate SAP’s commitment to help businesses run live and will be showcased at SAPPHIRE NOW from May 17-19, 2016:

• Retail Clienteling is a retail app developed by SAP that allows the sales associates to exceed customer expectations by providing recommendations, offering additional services and products, and accessing real-time data anywhere, at any time.

• Electronic Medical Record (EMR) is geared towards the healthcare industry, providing a 360-degree, integrated patient view to support collaboration between doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals, utilizing SAP’s new patient engagement and healthcare analytics capabilities.

• Asset Maintenance Worker helps field workers completely transform the way maintenance is done through a strong IoT platform that provides better, faster, real-time data that drives predictive analytics.

• Project Assistant leverages real-time data from SAP S/4HANA and enables project managers to collaborate, report, and manage their projects and bring them to life at unprecedented levels of speed and efficiency.

What Are Our Customers Saying?

With over 98% of Fortune 500 companies using iOS devices, our customers are responding enthusiastically to the announcement. Two customers who will benefit from the EMR and Asset Maintenance Worker apps, respectively, offered these comments:

“We are extraordinarily excited about the promise of the Apple and SAP alliance. This partnership will build on our foundation of co-innovation and patient care impact and extend what is possible with SAP EMR Unwired on iOS devices. We look forward to holistically transforming patient engagement and clinical research together to advance precision medicine.”

– Martin Peuker, associate CIO, Charite, and IT director, Berlin Institute of Health

“SAP and Apple’s partnership and field-focused solution could be a great enabler for our digital workforce. The digital utility would give our field team useful and actionable information, simple interactions, and technology that is intuitive, efficient, and integrated with our core applications.”

– Gary Hayes, SVP and CIO, technology operations, CenterPoint Energy