SAP announced huge investments in IoT, a real opportunity for OEM partners?

SAP has announced last year investment plans of 2 billion over five years to help business and government entities benefit from the proliferation of sensors, smart devices and big data that is transforming business with the internet of things (IoT).

This is a huge opportunity for our OEM ecosystem and for companies who develop applications in the IoT domain to benefit from SAP investments and leverage the new SAP Leonardo Internet of Things platform.

Let us review what are the challenges when a company wants to develop an application evolving sensors and smart devices.

Firstly, the pain point is to get the sensors and devices to be smart, that means to be able to communicate. It seems obvious when we are speaking about new materials, they have by design embedded open protocols such as Internet Protocol. You can then directly connect and collect the information from this smart devices to a central platform that can be on premise or in the Cloud such as below:

If the ‘things’ have been built in the last decades, they may not be ‘IP connectable’ simply because at that time IP was not the standard we know today or the manufacturer has developed a proprietary protocol for communication.

To face this challenge, SAP Leonardo Internet of Things Platform is delivering a huge variety of protocols ‘out of the box’ to facilitate the developer’s life and shorten development lifecycle and finally the time to market.

Secondly, it is also important to provide a complete end to end platform to develop applications and be flexible enough to manage user expectations in term of application usability, volume capacity, deployment strategy (SAP Cloud, AWS, Azure…). SAP Leonardo Internet of Things Platform is offering that flexibility to develop on premise or natively in the cloud or in a hybrid architecture as desired to fulfill technical requirements.

Lastly, in a connected world the IoT application developed by the OEM partners needs to be connected to transactional systems from various providers.

For this, SAP Cloud platform is providing out of the box connectivity to SAP Applications (SAP ECC, Success Factors, Ariba, Cloud for Customers, Hybris…) and non-SAP application connectors (certified third party application connectors, or open connectors)

The SAP OEM Channel is offering a real opportunity for existing partners and potential partners to innovate and deliver IoT applications by using SAP Leonardo Internet of Things Platform and related components

You can find more information on:

https://www.sap.com/products/leonardo.html

Bertrand PATIGNY, SAP OEM Senior Partner Advisor