SAP and Apple collaborate to hook up SAP HANA Cloud hosting Platform with iOS

Inside a move that has not thoroughly impressed experts, SAP and Apple have announced collaboration that will allow iOS applications to hook up with SAP HANA Cloud Platform. Developers will be able to build native iOS applications structured on SAP HANA Cloud Platform (HCP). These applications will be able to access the core data and business processes from S/4HANA while benefiting from iPhone and iPad features, such as Touch IDENTITY fingerprint recognition, Location Providers and Notifications.

Kevin Ichhpurani, an SAP exec vice president, said: "The purpose is to deliver new activities for customers with either new applications or new  activities with existing applications for a more beautiful, powerful and engaging experience. This comes through profound design collaboration between the two companies. We'll introduce and colocate resources jointly, and they're going to be instrumental in the appearance of our new solutions, but there will also be engineering collaboration.

Ichhpurani added: "Those developers who would like to build enterprise-level applications can be able to leverage the HCP SDK to extend any SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS PRODUCTS (SAP) solution and build development advancement creativity on top of  (SAP) and non-SAP programs without leaving the development environment that they are comfortable with. They might be able to actually drag and drop SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS micro services, which could be a tax calculations or a shopping basket, in to the iOS application. So, this allows us to visit after a much larger developer community to innovate and influence SAP.

Yet industry observers have not shown much interest in the development. The effort will also include an application developer's "training academy" that will imbibe best practices in development for iOS and SAP HCP. The iOS SDK and the training academy are expected to be generally available by the end of 2016.

Jon Reed, co-founder of Diginomica, said: "I would take the S/4HANA aspects with a grain of salt, in terms of they are trumpeting S/4HANA getting real-time data. Obviously, a developer would need access to that environment, but there are just not that many S/4HANA environments out there. SAP can make some hay about this by working on some software that show off real-time products, like a predictive maintenance iphone app where they'll have live real-time information, but you don't need S/4HANA and real-time data to build cool mobile applications.