SAP is rolling out 200 Research in Motion PlayBook tablets as it examines how to best navigate the intersection of analytics and mobility.
That deployment is still small relative to the 4,000 iPads inside of SAP, but makes the enterprise software giant one of the larger PlayBook guinea pigs.
Executives outlined the tablet ratio on a conference call previewing the company's business intelligence/analytics plans at its Sapphire conference next month.
The key points:
- Bryan Katis, vice president and general manager of SAP's Enterprise Performance Management unit, said the company is working to make HTML 5 the standard in all its applications.
- But HTML 5 will be more of an export for existing analytics software instead of rebuilding software.
- Flex/Flash remains a key enterprise window to bring enterprise applications to Android and RIM tablets. Many dashboards feature Flash-based UIs.
- Business Intelligence 4 will be generally available at the end of June.
- Sapphire key topics will revolve around mobility and analytics, specifically SAP's HANA analytics appliance.
"We recognize that there's a change in the workforce that will require a new user experience," said Katis.
SAP is aiming to tailor business data to users based on their devices---tablets and smartphones.
As for the PlayBook, SAP executives said that it's too early to tell how the device fares. The plan is to get PlayBooks to users internally at SAP so they can leverage enterprise performance management tools.
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