2.1 Mobile Engine – What is it?

The concept of mySAP® Mobile Business is based on an open standard-platform, the SAP Mobile Engine. Mobile Engine is implemented on mobile devices as an integral component of MySAP® Technology. The core components of a Mobile Engine environment are:

• Local Web Server (For mobile device)
• Database Layer
• Business Logic
• Data Synchronization and Replication Layers
• Deployment Console

The article will discuss all these components in detail, in the next section, Mobile Engine Architecture. Mobile Engine adopted an open standard platform to support all existing wireless devices such as handheld, Laptops, and PDAs and enable deployment across various types of networks like Bluetooth, WAN, GPRS.

Since SAP Mobile Engine is built on open industry standards, it supports Java technology, which is based on Java Virtual Machine (JVM). JVM provides a development environment for JSP (Java Server Pages) and Java 2 platform. It also complies with the Web Services technology that includes SOAP and XML. Developers can exploit the open source technology to develop network and device independent applications.

It also enables enterprises to implement mobile enterprise applications to internal and external users in both online and offline mode. In online mode, mobile users can access the SAP systems using browser interface while in offline mode mobile users access SAP system using the native interface of the mobile device (See Figure 1).

Mobile Engine facilitates mobile applications for various enterprise scenarios such as Human Resources (HR), Supply Chain Management (SCM), and Business Intelligence etc.

Figure 1: SAP Mobile Engine Interfaces