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New Zealanders can often appreciate the majesty of sailing, not only as a primal battle against nature and the elements, but as a truly magnificent (and environmentally conscious) way to travel across seas from our isolated homeland. At SAP, we recognise sailing’s importance as a sport, a community, and benefactor of intelligent technologies.

Sail Insight mobile app was developed by SAP in partnership with Sailing Yacht Research Foundation (SYRF). The app democratises tracking and analysing live sailing for all segments of the sailing community. What was traditional a prohibitive cost for many sailors and race organisers, this app is available free in 2020, allowing users to create a sailor profile, participate in regattas, test all features, conduct self-tracking, share results, and send invitations on social media. Next year, Sail Insight will shift to offer both free access and a subscription-based model managed by SYRF, unlocking additional features and benefits.

Sail Insight is powered the world’s largest and most robust sailing database – SAP Sailing Analytics, which provides insights and transparency using cloud and in-memory technology that processes GPS and wind measurement data in real time.

SAP Sailing Analytics is the largest and most robust sailing database and platform in the world, offering the sailing community a full suite of features available remotely and in one place such as analytics, live leaderboard, self-tracking, simple race management (InApp), and social/sharing integration.

The app is designed to be intuitive, helpful, convenient, and user-friendly, providing sailors, coaches, clubs and fans with live data and analytics. The app offers live leaderboards, a handicap racing leaderboard with live predictive handicap scoring, and access to superior analytics for sailors globally.

This is critical resource when races are cancelled or postponed, as data can help keeping people connected and informed, assisting sailors and coaches in training and prediction, while giving clubs and race organisers access to live tracking to enhancing the viewing experience. SAP and SYRF are dedicated to improving sailboat racing through technology for the good of the sport and its supporting community.

SAP has been a trusted leader and pioneer in the worldwide sailing community since 2011. With over 99.995% availability, SAP provides a unique platform to showcase innovations such the world’s biggest sailing database, covering 17,787 tracked races, 441 events, approximately 78,000,000 GPS-fixes tracked with Sail Insight, and 405,000,000 GPS-fixes in total.

SAP’s online sailing platform accounts for 1.4 million unique visitors annually and has garnered 2.4 million impressions on social media (from own-generated assets on owned channels). With 70 million active sailors and 250 million fans worldwide according to the World Sailing Federation, sailing is the best sport to showcase sustainability, innovation, and digital disruption on a global stage.

The technical core of Sail Insight, SAP Sailing Analytics provides a live sailing data analytics engine as well as the data mining engine to analyse across different timespans and perspectives. SAP Sailing Analytics generates the live leaderboards, analytics, and post-race reports that will be displayed in the app. This means sailors, coaches, and clubs around the world can set up and manage their own races, straight from an app, while also enabling sailing fans to track data and live scoring as they follow events and regattas from wherever in the world they log into Sail Insight.

To ensure the app meets the needs of the entire sailing community, a broad range of stakeholders were involved in its development, including the World Sailing Association, Australian Sailing Team, US Sailing, top sailors, professional race officers, six national sailing leagues and the SAILING Champions League Series, SAP programmers and consultants, SailTracks (professional sailing media production and distribution company), key media and app agencies from SAP´s network, and our key partners – the SYRF.

The SYRF is a non-profit organisation dedicated to growing the sport of sailboat racing using technology. The main focus currently is contributing funds, experience and connections to building data platforms, such as Sail Insight and SAP Sailing Analytics for the sport. Since 2006, SYRF has funded numerous projects including the “Wide-Light” CFD project, Downwind aero forces and moments project, Manual PCS calculator and scoring system for offshore multihulls, a foil project in conjunction with ORC, and a SYRF’s Offshore Scoring System.

SAP Sailing is committed to accelerating growth for the worldwide sailing community through a combined Grassroots and Pinnacle approach. Grassroots via foundation SYRF and a self-service intelligent platform. And partnering with Pinnacle events like the Sailing World Cup and Sailing World Championships. Future goals include providing SAP Sailing Analytics for the next Olympic Games Sailing Regatta and releasing a self-sustaining SAP Sailing platform by 2022.

“Since 2011, SAP has been a trusted partner and innovation leader across the sport of sailing, creating solutions that improve performance for sailors, teams and race organizers while also growing fan interest and participation,” SAP Chief Technology Officer and Executive Board Member, Juergen Mueller said. “The new app leverages the power of our sailing analytics database to create a mobile app that allows members of the sailing community to access data and information to help improve performance and enhance their race and event experience.”

SYRF Technical Director Larry Rosenfeld said “We are thrilled to be working with SAP to help grow sailing worldwide. The technology and capabilities that SAP bring are tremendous, and together with our board’s lifetime of work in the sport, we believe we can make progress even faster together by introducing and getting feedback from the community now.”

As sailing is not only thrilling to watch and participate in – the sport has a key role in supporting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and intelligent technologies contribute to making more environmentally conscious decisions and partnerships. To learn more about these innovative and free resources for sailing fans, visit the SAP Sailing site for more details.

This article originally published on Linkedin