Last May Patently Apple posted a report titled "Apple Rocks the Enterprise Market with New SAP Partnership to Revolutionize Work on the iPhone & iPad." Their joint effort was to deliver a new iOS software development kit and training academy so that developers, partners and customers could easily build native iOS apps tailored to their business needs.

Today, Apple and SAP SE stated that they're set to release a tool on March 30 aimed at helping developers build iPhone apps for big businesses. The new tool is designed to let developers easily feed data between SAP's business-oriented software systems and Apple's consumer-oriented iOS mobile platform.

Currently, most of SAP's systems are used on personal computers rather than on mobile devices. SAP plans to change that by working directly with Apple on software tools that will make it easier to access data on SAP systems from apps on an iPhone or iPad, an effort that began last spring as we noted at the top of our report.

Reuters notes in their report that "The tool could, for example, let employees log into business apps with fingerprint readers common on iPhones rather than a password, or replace bulky inventory scanning guns used in warehouses with iPhones.

Rick Knowles, a senior vice president at SAP specifically added that 'The collaboration between our two firms is unparalleled from an engineering standpoint. Every five to six weeks, we've put our developers in the room with Apple's lead engineers to do a code-level review.'

The SAP partnership also gives iOS developers a new way to gain revenue in an era when most of the App Store's growth is driven by downloads in China and by game makers. Apple said earlier this year that developers made $20 billion from the App Store in 2016, an increase of 40 percent from 2015.

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