Chile’s Empresa Nacional de Telecomunicaciones (Entel) and German software company SAP have teamed up to offer mobile services to Entel’s enterprise clients based on SAP’s mobile platform.
“This is a step further in the offering of convergent services, complementing our actual services: SAP Hosting and Mobile Data Plans,” said Julián San Martín, Entel’s VP of corporate marketing, to RCR Wireless News.
The mobile applications offered by Entel will be available via a new Web portal, where customers will be able to search, download and install business applications. These mobile applications are pre-configured and integrated with transactional systems. “Entel will implement for each customer a private mobile store where he can download and integrate apps. Each app will connect to Entel’s mobile platform, which will have a secure connection to the customer’s SAP,” noted San Martín.
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The new offer is part of Entel’s strategy targeting the corporate market, which focuses on offering an integrated solution for each customer. According to the company, the corporate market represents 13% of its income. San Martín said Entel expects to garner 30% of the growing enterprise mobile apps space with the new offer.
According to both companies, this agreement is unprecedented in Latin America. “We will be the first telecommunications company to offer this service in the local corporate market, giving our customers tools to improve and optimize their business processes and decision-making,” said San Martín.
Entel said it was targeting large companies that need to implement more than three applications for different mobile operating systems and integrate with three or more back end servers. Also, the company said it will offer solutions for segments or functions, as sales force automation and field support. “This partnership will offer to our customers the possibilities to buy and end-to-end solution starting from the smartphone, until the leading integration platform,” added San Martín.
As for SAP, the Entel partnership is in line with its recently unveiled strategy. The company has said the mobile platforms is an important part of its global strategy to reach 1 billion users for its solutions by 2015. Over its 40 years, SAP (SAP) has signed up 35 million end users to its traditional enterprise solutions. In the last 15 months SAP said it has attracted 60 million users to its mobile platform.
A quick analysis on these numbers points to the huge potential mobile tools can provide to IT companies such as SAP, which for its recent past has targeted its efforts beyond traditional enterprise resource planning and moving toward mobile, big data and cloud computing, as RCR Wireless News previously reported.
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