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Underlining its commitment to an open partner and developer ecosystem, SAP America, a subsidiary of SAP, announced it is collaborating with Xamarin and Service2Media to provide developers with mobile app development frameworks that can enable development on the company’s SAP Mobile Platform.
These mobile development environments are intended to allow enterprises to rapidly build rich and personalized mobile apps for Apple iOS, Google Android and Microsoft Windows Phone devices from a single code-base.
The Xamarin initiative includes a Xamarin Test Cloud with built-in SAP Mobile Platform data verification capabilities, designed to allow developers to perform more fully automated testing of mobile apps across hundreds of devices simultaneously.
Other initiatives include a Xamarin certified consultant program available to Xamarin’s 150 global consulting partners to help ensure efficient development of compelling apps using both Xamarin and SAP solutions and an expanded Xamarin University program to include an expert-led course for training enterprise developers to build Xamarin mobile apps that can connect to SAP Mobile Platform.
“Microsoft has been working closely with both SAP and Xamarin, and we see this support for SAP Mobile Platform APIs as a benefit for the Microsoft developer community,” S. Somasegar, corporate vice president of the developer division for Microsoft, said in a statement. “The ability to build enterprise-class applications across all major device platforms from within Visual Studio will help reduce the time and cost of mobile app development for developers working in a heterogeneous environment.”
Meanwhile, Service2Media has expanded its App Lifecycle Platform M2Active to support SAP Mobile Platform application programming interfaces (APIs) through a new connector module.
M2Active now gives users a comprehensive set of tools, rapid workflows and cloud services to create iOS, Android and Windows apps that can access SAP systems.
According to an August 2013 report from IT research firm Gartner, there are more than 1.2 billion people accessing the Web from their mobile devices and 80 percent of mobile time is spent inside mobile apps.
To meet increasingly heavy demand for 4G/LTE connectivity around the world, SAP also announced Long Term Evolution (LTE) roaming peering agreements with MTT Russia, Orange and Telenor Global Services at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) convention in Barcelona, Spain.
SAP Mobile Services is a provider of mobile interconnection and mobile consumer engagement services. It provides mobile operators with capabilities in global messaging interconnect, data roaming and an array of IPX-based services.
The company also announced that in the last two months, new anti-spam capabilities within the SAP SMS 365 mobile service have detected and eliminated nearly 18 million attempted spam and grey route messages. In January alone, SAP SMS 365 blocked a major credit card phishing attack targeting several U.S. operators.
To enhance its ability to fight spam and other unwanted SMS traffic, Cloudmark’s mobile security product, Cloudmark Security Platform, has been integrated into SAP SMS 365.
With Cloudmark Security Platform, SAP SMS 365 offers messaging security protection that automatically detects and mitigates messaging abuse and threats.
The new anti-spam capability of SAP SMS 365 is a value-added service that SAP has implemented for a large portion of U.S. mobile operators and some operators around the world.
Continued rollout of the service is planned throughout 2014 with the goal of providing all mobile operator customers worldwide with more reliable traffic patterns and protection against incoming SMS spam and grey route messages, the company said.