The development of MOMENTUM kept us from msc mobile busy the last 9 months. So it is very exciting to finally have the product in my hands and to demo it on a tablet pc to customers and partners at SAPPHIRE. The feedback has been great and I want to give you three reasons why I call MOMENTUM the next generation Mobile Field Service for SAP.

First, it is not so much about what you can do with MOMENTUM, but about how you can do it. I think we created a user interface that is easy to understand and to use. I would even say it is the best user interface of any mobile field service application for SAP. By purpose we made it very simple, without adding feature of feature that no productive user really needs and that would only serve to boost the ego of our developers. But even a simple and easy to use solution can offer everything a user needs. MOMENTUM has a straight forward navigation pattern, always showing the list of objects (Orders, Notifications, Business Partners etc.) on the left side and the details on the right.

MOMENTUM is optimized for touch screen devices: table rows, buttons, tabs etc. are all big enough that even I - with my big hands - cannot miss them. And I think it is not a crime to copy the functionality of great products like the iPhone or iPad. That’s why our lists offer an iPhone like scrolling, which adds an iPhone like user experience to our solution. It feels great to use the application! I am also very proud of the performance we achieved! The application is rocket fast; the optimized queries to the offline database ensure that you get an instant feedback once you touch the screen. This is also thanks to the native UI technologies we used to build MOMENTUM: C# and Microsoft .Net!

But not everything that is great is done by msc mobile - I think we should also give Microsoft credit that they made the first steps in the right direction: The on-screen keyboard of Windows 7 is great, but what I am most impressed of is the hand writing recognition. At SAPPHIRE I gave the tablet to a customer at the Sybase booth. He tried to enter information by writing on the screen. Either he had some really bad handwriting or he did it by purpose - it looked horrible, but the system recognized his input perfectly!



As simple as our solution is, I have to admit that sometimes customers need more advanced features, especially if they deal with large amounts of data. For this purpose we created a second version of the UI that is targeting laptops and more experienced users. It is showcasing the possibilities of our solution: Smaller and more elegant UI elements, filtering, sorting, grouping and much more. I do not want to talk about the other UI features like displaying documents and map integration – I save that for another time.

So I think we do not discuss the topic usability any further. For me it is clear that we created something unique with our user interface - the only way we could make it better would be to port it to the iPad, but that is not the right device for field service solutions - unfortunately ;-)



The second big thing is the technology behind MOMENTUM. It is built on top of the market leading enterprise mobility platform Sybase Unwired Platform. I worked with many mobile frameworks in the past: Mobile Infrastructure, Netweaver Mobile 7.1, Sky Mobile - just to name a few. None of them was as complete as SUP by Sybase. I say this since a long time and most people agreed with me. We went into multiple RFIs and RFQs together with Sybase. We lost them because we only had a platform and not a ready to deploy solution. But the response from these customers was always the same: "You convinced us that you have the best platform, but without an application we go with someone else" That has changed now!



The third and final reason is the SAP/Sybase deal. Sybase is no longer only one of the co-innovation partners of SAP, but they will get acquired by SAP within the next weeks. This is of course changing the game. The Sybase platform will for sure be pushed by SAP and it will be the first choice for SAP customers, if they want to mobilize their field service processes.

I think because of these facts we can call MOMENTUM the next generation of mobile field service for SAP!