Afaria is back in leaders quadrant in Gartner 2013

After an year in challengers quadrant in 2012 after acquisition and rebuilding of brand SAP hits back leaders place in May 2013 report of Gartner . Below is an abstract from the report itself.
SAP invested in the MDM market to support its customers and partners in the pursuit of mobilizing their employees by managing devices, applications and content. SAP acquired mobile management, application development and security technologies from Sybase and has expanded development of MDM under the Afaria name. SAP emphasizes scalability, integration, application development and usability as primary objectives, but also has critical security and management features in place. It recently increased certificate management and updated its directory integration capabilities. SAP also has a strong enterprise presence and cross-sells Afaria with a mobile application development platform through a global direct sales team. Since our last Magic Quadrant research, SAP also signed and executed a substantial OEM deal for Afaria with CA Technologies (the first of its kind with a leading system management player), and expanded its position in the telecom/value-added reseller (VAR) area by licensing Afaria to Ingram Micro, the world's largest technology distributor. SAP is positioned in the Leaders quadrant in the Magic Quadrant, and should be considered by companies that invest in new and existing SAP products and services, and those that can benefit from tighter linkages between application development tools and MDM platforms. It should also be evaluated in terms of the strength of Afaria, its container architecture and application development tools, and its third-party ISV program with over 100 partners.

Strengths

• Buyers already invested in SAP will find that Afaria strengthens the long-term viability of SAP's mobility road map. The vendor's 200,000-plus business customer base, global partner ecosystem and worldwide direct sales teams will fuel growth.
• SAP provides a comprehensive app-neutral mobile container strategy, although it has a limited number of app partners. Applications must be compiled with the Afaria software development kit (SDK), but SAP should be able to attract a growing ISV community, in addition to its large base of users leveraging its analytics SDK. SAP can attract partners on a more complementary basis than some of its competitors coming from adjacent markets, such as endpoint protection or life cycle management.
• SAP has the global scale to build mobile partnerships with companies in security, life cycle management and business apps, with considerably more leverage and less apparent competition than other MDM vendors.
• The Afaria tool has one of the longest and most mature track records of all MDM tools, and is well-regarded for its functionality, including integrated capabilities of SAP BusinessObjects into the Afaria management console, which can be enhanced with SAP Hana, giving it strong analytical and reporting functions that support the real-time analysis of mobile user trends.

Cautions

• Buyers that do not have or want long-term investments in SAP's larger framework might find that even a modest investment in Afaria might lead to trade-offs against opportunities for increasing functionality, although SAP has demonstrated faster innovation during this past year.
• SAP has some challenges selling Afaria stand-alone in competitive MDM deals. Gartner expects that SAP will move to offer an aggressively priced per-device commercial model for stand-alone MDM cloud services to eliminate barriers to entry — a move that will reduce margins and fuel further price competition around core MDM functionality.

Full report (Source of text and image) : http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1FRIMGV&ct=130523&st=sb

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