What Happens to Syclo After Its Acquisition By SAP?
If your company suddenly had two products that owned highly-coveted Leader rankings in the same Gartner Magic Quadrant, would you kill one of them? Or would you celebrate your good fortune by trying to accommodate and integrate the two?
That was the question that faced SAP after closing on its acquisition of Syclo Mobile in June.
While Syclo's popular roster of field service and enterprise asset management (EAM) apps were SAP's main prize, Syclo also owned a long-time mobile application development platform (MADP) called Agentry.
Agentry is no slouch. Besides being ranked along with SAP's SUP among the leaders in Gartner's MADP Magic Quadrant report earlier this spring, Agentry has hundreds of customers.
The acquisition did spark some fears among Agentry customers they would be abandoned.
Despite my feeble attempts at creating suspense, I'm sure you won't be surprised when I reveal that: no, it won't be the case. SAP will continue to invest in Agentry, affirmed executives at Syclo's annual developer conference (keynote replays and slide decks available at link to left) earlier this month.
Syclo vice-president for Agentry development, Deepika Duggirala, said Syclo is already working on supporting apps running on Android Jellybean 4.1, Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, and the latest version of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for Windows PCs. Syclo is also improving the Agentry server by "leveraging" HTML5, adding features such as the ability to scan QR and barcodes, integration with Bluetooth peripherals, and gesture input, she said.
Meanwhile, Agentry features are being imported to improve SUP, while the two products are integrated, said both Syclo founder and CEO Rich Padula and SAP Global Solutions President (and Padula's new boss), Sanjay Poonen.
(Left-click on the slides below to enlarge and right-click to save)
SAP/Syclo is "creating a single run-time environment by taking Agentry and putting it within SUP," said Padula.
That means as existing Agentry users upgrade to the new platform, they will get to use the same Agentry client runtime, which will communicate to the Agentry server via SUP's secure network pathways.
"It will be completely seamless for" existing Agentry users, said Poonen. Agreed Padula: This "won't be disruptive to Agentry or SUP apps."
This architecture also allows companies to manage both Agentry and SUP apps via a single management console - the SUP one. That's a boon because virtually all mobile apps built by SAP and its partners run with SUP. Syclo's application editor will also be embedded within SUP.
The next slide, meanwhile, shows Phase 2, in which Agentry features will be imported into SUP to create a fully unified single development platform.
