You’ve likely been hearing a lot about SAP’s promise to deliver the Intelligent Enterprise to its customers. Let’s face it, running a business isn’t trivial. And no matter your industry, line of business or company size, you should be given the tools to become a best-run business.
Enabling technologies like machine learning, analytics, blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT) are not just nice-to-haves; they are fundamental to the success of your business. That’s why SAP is here. We offer customers such innovative and scalable technologies that are embedded into business applications and provide real-time intelligence and insight.
Customers can realize a step change in productivity, deliver a better customer experience, and enable new business models, while running their business from the cloud to the edge with greater flexibility, to make faster, more confident decisions. This is what we mean by an intelligent enterprise.
Delivering the Intelligent Enterprise with IoT
IoT is a key enabler of the Intelligent Enterprise, where data enables intelligence, which feeds process automation and, ultimately, innovation. At SAP, we believe best-run businesses are data- and process- driven, and we’re committed to help deliver on this promise.
IoT will help unlock the Intelligent Enterprise with embedded IoT in your line-of-business applications. Imagine enriching business transactions with IoT data for additional business context. With real-time data, insights, and analysis from sensor-enabled IoT devices, machines can predict maintenance needs, quality issues, or problems with manufacturing processes in advance, in order to expedite resolution. Combined with customer preferences, these data-driven insights can lower material costs, reduce risk, and significantly decrease asset downtime, often by as much as 50 percent. That is impactful by any measure.
Additional capabilities are available to support interoperability, connectivity, device management, or edge computing, in close collaboration with our expanding partner ecosystem —more on that later. With SAP Leonardo IoT Edge, you can run your business from the cloud to the edge, without dependency on latency, bandwidth or connectivity. By connecting business processes and embedding them with real-time intelligence at the edge or otherwise, our customers can make more confident decisions to achieve better business outcomes.
The SAP Leonardo IoT Imperative
As the head of SAP’s IoT business, I’ve met with many customers about their business challenges and pain points. The recurring theme I keep hearing is the massive influx of IoT data being generated from physical devices. Customer demand for IoT solutions is on the rise, with a strong desire to gain new insights, such as product or asset situational awareness, increase operational visibility, enhance the customer experience, and enable intelligence at the edge, where the data is.
The good news is that SAP can help. Our new flagship IoT cloud solution SAP Leonardo IoT is an industrial IoT solution to help customers interpret and analyze their IoT data, make more informed real-time decisions, achieve better business outcomes, and even create new business models. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) focuses on smart, connected operations to create products and services, in conjunction with integrated software capabilities for business process automation. Customers can embed IoT directly into line-of-business solutions or extend existing business applications with IoT capabilities.
SAP Leonardo IoT Business Outcomes
As part of our overall IoT strategy, SAP Leonardo IoT brings intelligence to the enterprise by offering customers multiple paths to innovation, accompanied by a comprehensive set of industry-specific business services and IoT capabilities, to meet their business needs.
- Embed: SAP Leonardo IoT embeds into line-of-business applications from SAP, like SAP S/4HANA, SAP Digital Supply Chain, or SAP C/4HANA, so customers can benefit from the IoT-enabled intelligent enterprise suite. For example, with SAP Field Service Management, IoT usage data is provided to technicians in context with corresponding business information for problem diagnosis.
- Extend: SAP Leonardo IoT enables developers to extend existing SAP business processes by gaining information and insights from previously unconnected devices, such as machines, products, and assets, thereby extending the value of existing SAP applications and processes.
- Transform: SAP enables partners and customers to pursue open innovation and create new business models enabled by IoT, in the context of SAP business systems, while keeping core business processes stable. For example, SAP customer Kaiserwetter created a service schedule for wind farms, based on sensor data input, correlated with commodity prices of energy, to determine the most optimum window for maintenance.
- Enable business processes at the edge: SAP provides intelligent data processing at the edge orchestrated from the cloud. SAP Leonardo IoT runs business transactions correlated with device data, close to the source of IoT data, at the edge. For example, SAP Edge Services in oil rigs allows for intelligent data processing, bringing in business data from plant maintenance and inventory systems for streamlined maintenance operations.
Cloud-to-Cloud IoT Interoperability
SAP is committed to a strong partner ecosystem across industries and line-of-business applications. These partnerships are invaluable to our customer base, offering flexibility, choice, and open integration for IoT cloud-to-cloud interoperability.
We offer end-to-end solutions leveraging multiple partner options for infrastructure capabilities, including connectivity, device management, and security features at scale. SAP Leonardo IoT will continue to leverage the business value of partners by integrating sensor data correlated with business processes, event-driven business actions, real-time analytics, and IoT-enabled intelligence to optimize business outcomes.
SAP continues to be committed to a strong ecosystem for IoT and understands the value its partners can bring to joint customers. To that end, we are reinforcing and expanding our partner ecosystem. Today, at SAPPHIRE NOW, we announced another strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT Core to support cloud-to-cloud interoperability. For more details on this new partnership, please read “The Internet of Interoperability: SAP Leonardo IoT and AWS IoT.”
In February at MWC, we announced our extended partnership with Microsoft in the IoT space to kick-start our cloud-to-cloud interoperability strategy and offer customers the option to benefit from the secure, scalable, and best-in-class device management and connectivity capabilities provided by using Microsoft Azure IoT Hub. Sensor telemetry data collected with Azure IoT services is relayed to SAP Leonardo IoT and intelligently combined with business applications.
In addition, SAP Leonardo IoT Edge gives customers the option to extend support for their business processes locally on top of Microsoft Azure IoT Edge runtime. Essential business function modules based on SAP Leonardo IoT Edge are also planned to run in containers on Microsoft Azure IoT Edge, reducing customers dependency on latency, bandwidth, and connectivity.
I am happy to announce that cloud-to-cloud interoperability with Microsoft is now generally available and our joint work on the above-mentioned edge scenario is expected for general availability later this year.
With choice comes flexibility and opportunity. We offer a choice of multiple clouds for better business agility and outcomes. By choosing to partner with the best technology partners on the market, we all become best-run businesses and help the world run better.
SAPPHIRE NOW Buzz
With SAPPHIRE NOW in full swing this week, we hope you will stop by and join us on the show floor to learn more about our IoT portfolio and strategy, hear firsthand from customers and their experience leveraging IoT technology from SAP, explore industry-relevant demos, and discover how you can unlock the Intelligent Enterprise for your enterprise.
We have the key – and we invite you to open the door and take the first step.
Elvira Wallis is senior vice president and global head of IoT at SAP.
