Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The bottom line is that you provide mobile app content to the entire ERP suite.

Joe Langner: Yes. The change within our business is that we change the apps once, but then they work with the multiple solutions we have. The customers don’t have to change their whole backup by turning off their systems; they can just add this if they have the need to extend the use of the tool.

From a mobile standpoint, we have a number of tools which are being positioned as added value to the ERP customer. In the cloud world we have expanded our relationship with Microsoft. As they are moving an increasing number of capabilities to their European platform, which is a global platform to build products and services, we are also moving our ERP systems to that same platform. If certain customers would like to choose to manage their infrastructure by themselves and also have a cloud based solution, we are adding that as an option. It is not just the cost that changes, it is also managing the infrastructure and having the flexibility to scale up or down depending on the needs of the business.

SM: So you have the small customer end of your spectrum on a public cloud.  I assume that all public clouds offer this service.

JL: Yes.

SM: On the higher end, you have customers who are on on-premise clouds, and in the event they want to be on private clouds, you have a partnership with Microsoft Azure for them to host their private cloud deployment on Azure.

JL: Yes. We are using Azure for two reasons. The first is if the customer wants his entire suite of services on the cloud. But we are also leveraging Azure to move data from the on-premise [system] to the cloud in order to enable the use of tools for BI, mobile, or tablet applications. Leveraging the hybrid capability allows us to not just present data in these applications, it also [enables] two-way communication. I can look at data, select some, and that information can be written to my on-premise solution.  The Azure technology enables us to have the data available and to have communication between that platform and the customers on-premise.  It can be a hybrid, or it can be fully in the cloud.

SM: As far as small businesses are concerned, there are a few trend questions I would like to ask you. What is your assessment of the Windows 8 adoption?

JL: I’m not sure I can answer that. It is so early in the cycle. Everything that I would give you is conjecture at this point.

SM: When you are deploying your mobile app content, which platforms are you using?  Is it mostly iOS and Android?

JL: We are still writing to iOS or Android for these first iterations. A lot of it is around the user experience and making sure that the form can fit correctly on the device. So, we are looking at both Android and Apple. Windows 8 hasn’t had much of an impact yet because it is still in the adoption cycle.

SM: So, you are not putting Windows 8 on the mobile platforms yet?

JL: Right now it is iOS and HTML5.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Joe Langner, EVP of Mid-Market Solutions for Sage, North America
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