First, there were some joke tweets this past week about funny/off-the-wall iPhone apps ~ playing off the marketing: ‘There’s an App for That’. Then there were discussions on application development processes with co-workers. So these lead me to consider the current options for SAS shops to surface information to their iPhone carrying staff.
I recalled that SAS mentioned during the SAS Global Forum 2009 Conference that they were working on surfacing the BI Dashboard and other Business Intelligence components from an iPhone app. A SAS employee let me view the application on her iPhone in the demo room that week and it looked very interesting. Since then however, I haven’t heard when it is scheduled for release and no searches found information on the sas.com site.
After web searches, I reviewed the SAS application that Sy Truong presented this fall at WUSS09 and at BASAS09. His material is available here:
- http://basas.com/newsletters/20091029/Presentation/SyTruong_iphone_slides.pdf
- http://www.lexjansen.com/wuss/2009/dpr/DPR-Truong.pdf
I had heard on NPR last week, there is a serious lack of application developer millionaires in the iPhone arena. There also doesn’t appear to be a significant number of organizations who have widely accepted data or reports available on mobile devices and then allow connections to their network via those devices (VPN). (Of course, aren’t laptops just larger mobile devices?)
Even with Sy’s development efforts, I still believe we are at the chicken/egg question – which will come first, customers/organizations clamoring for this functionality OR developers building something that will convince customers to allow for this ability.
What’s your take?
