Reaffirming its commitment to embrace the best choice for customers with an open partner and developer ecosystem, SAP AG today announced agreements with Adobe, Appcelerator and Sencha to provide users with an open mobile apps development framework for efficiently and cost-effectively developing on the company’s market-leading mobile platform. Today’s announcement was made at a press conference held this morning in San Francisco.

“We are seeing rapid innovation in the mobile market, especially in application development environments, frameworks and methodologies,” said Stephen Drake, program vice president, Mobility and Telecom, IDC. “It is critical for enterprise mobile applications platforms to support popular mobile application development environments and leverage the skills of millions of mobile apps developers using these environments. This approach will provide buyers of these enterprise mobile application platforms with the flexibility required to implement a best-fit mobile strategy and future proof their investment.”

By collaborating with Adobe, Appcelerator and Sencha, SAP will enable millions of developers to effectively build mobile apps based on their choice of client architectures — from native to hybrid Web container to mobile Web. Developers will be able to do so while leveraging an industry-leading enterprise mobile application platform from SAP.

“As a leader in the enterprise mobility market, SAP is constantly looking for innovative ways to serve our customers and partners, and advance our vision for this market,” said Sanjay Poonen, president, Global Solutions, SAP. “By joining forces with leading mobile app development vendors like Adobe, Appcelerator and Sencha, we are making it easier for large communities of developers, in the millions, to innovate on our platform. We believe SAP is the only mobile platform provider delivering on the promise of an open platform architecture that supports innovative third-party development environments and tools, providing flexibility for customers to implement the right mobile app every time. SAP, customers, partners and the entire ecosystem now have a tremendous opportunity to rapidly produce millions of high quality apps using the tool of their choice.”

Adobe: PhoneGapPhoneGap is the most popular hybrid Web app runtime environment that allows developers to author native mobile applications with Web technologies such as HTML5. Applications built with PhoneGap have access to native device APIs and can be published across all major app stores.

“SAP and Adobe have always enjoyed a long-standing partnership,” said Danny Winokur, vice president and general manager, Interactive Development at Adobe. “With PhoneGap, we enable developers to create innovative mobile apps that combine native and Web functionality. The SAP mobile platform complements PhoneGap with market-leading mobile enterprise application platform capabilities that extend our expansive mobile app ecosystem to the enterprise.”

Appcelerator: Titanium Development PlatformAppcelerator’s Titanium is an Eclipse-based IDE, SDK and library of connectors used to rapidly build, test and deploy mobile, desktop and Web applications. For mobile development, Titanium Studio provides a framework to develop rich application experiences, and connect those apps to SAP and 220 other data sources. Titanium SDK enables the enterprise to deploy native, hybrid and mobile Web apps all from a single JavaScript code base.

“We are thrilled to enable SAP customers to develop compelling, useful mobile apps throughout their enterprises,” said Jeff Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator. “Appcelerator’s 300,000 mobile developers will soon be able to integrate SAP data into their mobile apps through a single, integrated environment.”

Sencha: TouchSencha Touch is a high-performance HTML5 mobile application framework and the cornerstone of the Sencha HTML5 platform. Built for enabling world-class user experiences, Sencha Touch 2 is the only HTML5 framework that enables developers to build fast and impressive apps that work on iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Kindle Fire and more. Ready for the enterprise, Sencha Touch includes built-in capabilities that make it easy to build applications that align with business architectures.

“Sencha Touch is the ideal development platform for developers that want to take advantage of enterprise mobile platforms like SAP’s,” said Michael Mullany, CEO, Sencha. “With built in mobile packaging for iOS and Android, rich interactive HTML5 charting, and newly delivered support for the oData protocol, developers using Sencha Touch and SAP can quickly build enterprise class applications that mobilize their data assets cost effectively.”

“To create innovative mobile apps, every company must leverage the creativity and capabilities of in-house developers and millions of developers in the wider mobile ecosystem,” said Poonen. “With our ‘Mobile 2.0’ strategy, we are opening up our unified platform to capture all the innovation that is possible in the mobile world. This advances our vision to bring consumer grade usability and innovation to unwired businesses.”