Image courtesy SAP

Business intelligence kingpin SAP is looking to create a mobile ecosystem, and this week the company announced a new initiative that aims to incentivize developers who might be interesting in joining the program.

SAP has a huge, global clientele that could benefit from both business-to-business and business-to-consumer applications. But the company wants to let third party devs do all the work, and it’s providing them with resources to do that.

Developers that want to test the waters have access to a 30-day trial in the form of a hosted environment that runs the SAP mobile platform and the company’s ERP system, with plenty of room for experimentation.  The firm is also also offering a free Amazon Web Services license with an SDK, and last but not least we have the full-fledged version – the SAP Mobile Apps Partner program.

App makers that sign up for the program receive the full bundle, including the cloud-based development environment and the ability to publish applications on SAP’s marketplace. Here’s the full description:

“The program delivers a broad set of benefits, including cost-effective starter packages for development licenses and hosted sandboxes and development environments,” the company said in a released statement.  “It also provides access to a rich, vibrant community of developers for collaboration, SAP certification of mobile apps and the ability for partners to market and sell their apps via SAP Store.”

It could be said this latest push by SAP into this space is overdue. The software vendor has been committed to mobile for quite a while but is only now starting to fully take advantage of the community – an opportunity Google jumped on as well with its Cloud Platform.

Last week the search giant unveiled a partner program of its own that empowers members to develop applications and services for BigQuery, App Engine, Cloud Storage and Compute Engine.