SAP plans to invest a total of € 2 billion in their own IoT Innovation Platform SAP Leonardo by 2020. On July 11-12 the first edition of SAP Leonardo Live took place at the Kap Europa Congress Centre in Frankfurt. QforIT’s Former Member and Rik Dingemans got the chance to visit this event about new and promising breakthrough technologies such as: Analytics, Big Data, Blockchain, Design Thinking, Machine Learning, SAP Cloud Platform and of course the Internet of Things.

The Keynote on Tuesday morning was exciting in all its professionalism, beautiful stage, great speakers and interesting Customer Cases Studies from large and innovative companies like McLaren, BASF, Bosch, Caterpillar, Mitsubishi Corporation and Siemens. Also a team of SAP executives and Solution Experts was present to explain the future vision of SAP within the different domains of highly disruptive technologies. After the keynote there were 50+ Breakout-sessions, 10+ Innovation Workshops and of course a Show Floor with demonstrations and examples of applied technology in the field.

QforIT has a strong focus on Integration and Business Intelligence. These two focus areas are joined within in a third focus area: the Internet of Things. Data needs to be collected at the Edge, where smart devices generate oceans of data from all their sensors. This (big) data needs to be filtered at the Edge, aggregated and distributed to a central Cloud Platform, using advanced integration technologies. Big Data is not yet usable Information, so we’ll need Business Intelligence, advanced algorithms and dashboards to be able to add real business value.

7 Layers of the Internet of Things

The 7-layers of IoT model explains the journey from the ‘Fog’ to the ‘Cloud’, ‘Big Data’ to real Business Value, which will eventually be delivered within the 7^th layer.

As our journey has just begun, we are currently exploring and experimenting with the available technology in the Fog and will be moving up layer by layer. The challenge for us is not to get lost in this Fog, but keep having focus on the real added value to the customer, whose journey will be more of a top-down approach. The customer has a use-case, a problem which needs to be solved. That is his starting point and we need to be the guide to the technical solution that is needed to solve the problem.

SAP Leonardo Internet of Things Portfolio

During the SAP Leonardo Live conference two new interesting products were announced:

SAP Leonardo IoT Bridge, a configurable cloud solution which offers a persona-centric work environment that correlates business processes with data from IoT applications to provide intelligent business solutions in real-time. It includes a Thing Modeler to create a ‘digital twin’ of real-word things, persons and organizations.

SAP Leonardo Application Enablement Service, a SaaS business service that provides a selection of microservices and tools that help customers and partners to achieve fast time to value and develop IoT solutions efficiently.

On the SAP Digital Studio stand we met Engagement Specialist Former Member. He explained what SAP Leonardo Application Enablement Service is and how it can help us accelerating our own IoT prototyping project, more on that in another blogpost. He then demonstrated a SAP Leonardo connected scale model of a fully automated warehouse, built completely out of Fischertechnik . Some of us might remember this nifty and fun construction toy from childhood or school time. It is often used for education purposes about machines, motorization and mechanization. The metrics generated with the sensors in the model are displayed real-time within a dashboard built with the SAP Leonardo Application Enablement Service.

Developing IoT Solutions with SAP Leonardo IoT Foundation

As QforIT is all tech-savvy, we are eager to also get our hands on the latest and greatest products and solutions that were showcased and launched during the break-out sessions. We were lucky to be able to join the HandsOn Workshop ‘SAP: Develop E2E IoT Solutions with SAP Leonardo IoT Foundation’ which allowed us to experience the ease of building an IoT solution on the SAP Cloud Platform with SAP IoT Application Enablement. We built an IoT application in the new code-free perspective of the SAP Web IDE and deployed it on the SAP Cloud Platform. We created a dashboard by selecting UI widgets from a toolbox, arranged them on the UI and bound them to real data sources. This data was generated by different sensors (Humidity sensor, Light sensor, Ultrasonic sensor, Rotary Angle sensor, Temperature sensor) which we connected to the GrovePi Kit and a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B.

Looking back to this two-day event, we are even more enthusiastic about what is coming our way and we cannot wait to deliver the first IoT solutions together with our customers.