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Patent May Give Mobility a Needed Shot in the Arm

by Stephanie Neil, MA Editorial Staff

Posted on Sunday, September 28, 2008 3:00:00 AM       Sign Up to receive Daily News Alerts in your E-mail Inbox                               

Adding mobility to business applications has been elevated to the top of the priority list for companies managing global operations, a traveling sales force, and aftermarket field service requirements. To date, however, making that back-office application - be it ERP, SFA, or CRM - portable, has been more problematic than practical.

That's because it meant engaging the IT department in a complex integration exercise that typically included a central database to consolidate and replicate all of the data, which then needed to be synchronized across all kinds of devices, such as the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile PDA, or the iPhone.

"It was a big job. In fact, an almost insurmountable job, which explains why adoption of applications in the business mobile space has been limited," said Benjamin Wesson, vice president of product management at Dexterra Inc., a provider of middleware and applications used to manage mobile workforces.

In an effort to make mobility simple, Dexterra has developed what it claims is an innovative data abstraction layer. In August, the company was issued U.S. patent number 7,366,460 for its work on the abstraction technology. Although Dexterra has been using the technology in its Concert platform for a few years, the patent award, Wesson said, validates what Dexterra set out to do when it started as a company eight years ago. The mission: Accelerate the adoption of mobile applications through a seamless integration framework.

The now patented technology adds pre-built adapters that extract information from middleware, messaging systems, and databases.

Even with the prevalence of Web services, to mobilize an SAP system, for example, an integrator would need to understand NetWeaver or specific APIs, such as BAPI or IDoc, in order to accomplish a data exchange. But Dexterra's application adapter automatically abstracts native remote function calls (RFC) and has mapped out all of the operations required on a given process, the company said.

This layer of abstraction, between multiple back-office systems and mobile applications, defines data as rules and objects, allowing the data to move seamlessly through the Dexterra Concert platform without being synchronized, staged, or replicated. For example, if you want to create, edit, or delete a service order, the technology automatically calls the BAPIs that will update the object, Wesson said.

"We don't want to trivialize it, but the point is, we've lowered the bar," Wesson said. "We've taken this from insurmountable to possible, as long as you understand how to work with Web services. Our hope is that the people who might be on the fence as far as [weighing the] benefits of mobility, or who may have been scared off by cost or the ongoing effort of maintaining the applications, will take a closer look."

This article originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Managing Automation.