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The iphone/ipad mobility ship has sailed. But thankfully SAP Business Objects has gone from playing about in a sailboat (to which they are usually keen to associate) to a power boat which should close them right back up in the hand held business intelligence space. Version 4 of SAP Business Objects will offer an updated, and integrated, version of Business Objects Mobile (MoBI) with an Iphone and Ipad application to follow.

Currently SAP does have a mobile solution for apple devices but it is based around Business Objects Explorer. Explorer is a great product for searching and exploring data but its interface is very restrictive and wouldn’t really be suitable for typical dashboards that seem such an obvious fit to mobile devices like the iPad. Business Objects Dashboards might be the answer but this is a rebranded version of Xcelsius which is limited to Flash (SWF) file output… and flash and apple just don’t mix. Yes it’s true that with a bit of hackery you can get simple dashboards up and running using either an app that translates flash but this wont scale to the connected and more complex dashboards. An Adobe AIR wrapper gives the only way to use the product “out the box” to get Business Objects Dashboard Designer content on the apple platform although the memory intensive flash will still restrict using larger, complex, dashboards.

RoamBI, created by California based MeLLmo Inc, has for some time been the leader in BI delivery on the “I” platforms. Indeed, if you were anywhere near an SAP BI Sales person during the later part of last year you are sure to have been given a demo. Murmurings around the web forums of acquisitions and partnerships were a plenty as the integration with SAP Business Objects looked so strong. But its platform independence is now a key aspect of it marketing with connectors not only to SAP but also SalesForce.com, Oracle, Microsoft and Cognos.

While RoamBI may currently lead the way in user experience on the apple devices (with the awards to prove it) MicroStrategy customers have their own solution which is something of a middle ground between the visualization of RoamBI and the “build little reports” solution of Business Objects prior mobile offerings – the latter which has also been adopted by Cognos in version 10 of their own mobile product. SAP have been investing plenty of R&D time on their own App and early demo version look to deliver a great user experience to challenge the current market leaders.

Gartner are of the opinion that “Mobile BI will significantly expand the population of BI users to include a more mainstream audience and this opportunity will attract significant investment,” so it’s clear that SAP wish to keep such investment coming their way rather than an independent vendor. We are seeing more and more customers wanting to extend their performance management dashboards from the web browser based interface to mobile devices – and although the corporate mobile platform may be Blackberry (to which the Flash support means Xcelsius/Business Objects Dashboards work brilliantly) the proliferation of non company issues devices in the workplace to the most senior level still keeps these IPad/IPhone support requests coming.