SAP presented a preview last week of its game plan for developing mobile applications, enterprise information management and analytics in conjunction with its recent acquisition of Sybase. Within nine months, an open standards-based mobile business applications platform will be available for a variety of mobile devices and operating systems.

With Sybase's contribution, SAP aims to give companies real-time visibility into business activity with up-to-date information on any device, reported Chris Kanaracus of IDG News Service. Other plans include certifying the Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) database for use with Business Suite by mid-2011. 

But, the question is how these new capabilities will affect the larger business environment, said Bob Evans at InformationWeek. With SAP's ability to give enterprises a means of handling applications that provide insight about the business in real time, can it "win the resulting culture war precipitated by the radical and unprecedented shift to real-time operations?" he wondered. In other words, once SAP enables companies to transcend the technological challenges of dealing with their ever-mounting volumes of data, how will they adjust to the changes needed in processes, behavior and organizational structure?

SAP's CTO, Vishal Sikka, provides one perspective: "The cultural changes will be huge--massive," Sikka told Evans. "A CEO of a Fortune 50 company said that when they begin moving to real-time operations, he wants to have HR leaders in all of his board meetings because the changes that will spring from this real-time awareness will be widespread and profound."

For more:
- see Chris Kanaracus' article at NetworkWorld
- see Bob Evans' column at InformationWeek

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