Is SAP Mobile BI Ready for iOS 8?

Last week, on September 17, 2014, Apple released its latest mobile operating system, iOS 8, to the world. The previous week, Rick Costanzio, SAP executive vice president and general manager of Global Mobility Solutions, announced at Super Mobility Week that “SAP is excited to announce day-one support of Apple’s new iOS 8” (see related SAP Newsbyte, SAP Provides iOS 8 Support to Enhance the Mobile Enterprise Experience). Srikanth Rao, product owner for SAP BusinessObjects Mobile BI, acknowledged that SAP tested Mobile BI with the iOS 8 gold master and submitted a minor version 6.0.9 update prior to iOS 8’s launch date (see related SAP Community Network article).

It’s been exactly one week since Apple released iOS 8, but SAP Mobile BI users are still waiting for a compatible update. SAP customers have been in this predicament before with last year’s iOS 7 and previous iOS 6 (see related articles, Is SAP Mobile BI Ready for iOS 7? and Today is iOS 6 Day, but not for you). The gap between iOS and SAP updates seems to get smaller each year- and we’re grateful- but we’re still not at “day one” availability. With over 45% of Apple iOS users already using iOS 8 (see related MacWorld article, iOS 8 adoption nears 50 percent after just 6 days), it’s still an important target to hit.

As an armchair iPhone developer, I’ll speculate that part of the issue is that SAP waits for the gold master of iOS while other popular business apps like Dropbox, Evernote, and LinkedIn are patched using iOS betas. I think Rick Costanzio has set a fantastic and obtainable goal for SAP and its customers. I say with all seriousness that I hope that they’ll use SAP Lumira to visualize and analyze the entire inventory of SAP mobile apps to determine which apps were truly ready on iOS 8 Day One. Then SAP can apply Design Thinking to create project plans and processes that meet the cadence of Apple’s annual iOS updates.

According to SAP KB 2069700, SAP Mobile BI 6.0.9 will be released tomorrow.

UPDATE: SAP Mobile BI 6.0.9 appeared in the Apple iTunes Store on September 27, 2014- 10 days after the launch of iOS 8 and 2 days after iOS 8.0.2 was released.

How is SAP’s iOS support policies affecting your Mobile BI initiatives?

Additional Reading

• SAP KB 2069700 – SAP BusinessObjects Mobile v6.0.9 client application for iOS (iPhone/iPad)
• SAP Provides iOS 8 Support to Enhance the Mobile Enterprise Experience
• Request for feedback: SAP BusinessObjects Mobile and iOS version on SAP Community Network
• SAP BusinessObjects Mobile BI app in the Apple iTunes Store