Having a "smart" fridge is nothing new. Throughout the years, “things” connected to the Internet, including personal goods, machines, appliances, buildings, vehicles etc., have become smarter, able to gather data from their own environments and from user habits. Thus, a fridge connected to the Internet easily auto-regulates, based on its temperature, capacity, the time etc. Good. But in the current information age, what’s the value of isolated devices? Aren’t they, by definition, stuck in one dimension, limited to their own data?
Today, connectedness has taken a step further and prompted with it the democratization of Machine to Machines (M2M) technologies. All these “things” that were able to sense, feel, and understand trends are now able to share their data with fellow machines, creating collective insights in an “all-integrated” network. As a result of this collaboration, a real time data analysis can create a brand new system, able to suggest smarter choices, and do so without any human intervention. That’s at least the promise behind three letters: IoT or "Internet of Things." With the IoT, a single platform can collect real time data from sleep cycles, physical activities, diet, and eventual physical conditions, analyze them and ultimately suggest smarter choices for a healthier lifestyle.
This hyper-connectivity among devices is the key for enlightened choices both on personal and business levels. Steve Lucas, President of SAP Platform Solutions explains: “The system is intelligent enough to help the business make the right decision and to optimize the profit by analyzing huge volume of machine generated data in the real time.” SAP rapidly embraced the emergence of the IoT phenomenon, proposing adapted solutions to fit any specific business or industry needs in terms of M2M connectivity, cloud platform, device management, Big Data processing, and predictive analytics, etc. Thus, from Logistics, with the integration of real time data and distribution analytics to boost supply chain efficiency, to Retail with the implementation of smart vending solutions, SAP helps businesses to remain competitive in our fast-evolving technological era.
According to Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG), over 50 billion objects from our daily lives will be connected to the Internet by 2020, giving us access to an infinite amount of “black data.” With infinite business opportunities in all sectors, IoT also raises technical concerns: how will traditional systems handle this new wave of data, a tsunami even by Big Data standards? The SAP Data Management portfolio, based on the SAP HANA platform (an industry-leader in in-memory databases), provides businesses with real-time integration and analysis of a massive amount of data from newly connected devices to historical data, avoiding any potential scalability issues. Because business growth should never be restrained by technical limitations, SAP remains a strong ally to ensure companies run smoothly and to turn IoT opportunities into reality.
To learn more about SAP Solutions for Internet of Things, visit SAP.com
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