Extending the Intelligent Enterprise to the Edge: SAP Leonardo IoT Edge | SAP Edge Services 2018 Spring Releases Highlights

I learned recently that if you accidentally touch a hot stove, your hand’s reaction of pulling back is automatic and instantaneous and does not involve the neurons in the brain. This makes sense as an evolutionary benefit. If the message “Hot!!” had to go up your arm, up the neurons in your spinal cord, and then on to your brain for you to decide to move your hand and only then send an action request back down to your arm, this would be simply too long of a round trip. In a similar way, in the real world, your mission critical business processes often cannot afford the round trip delay from the edge to the enterprise core before triggering local action.

SAP Edge Services: Ultra-low and deterministic latency for Enterprise Business Processes

In the real world, your IoT data originates at the edge, which could be a remote plant, an open shaft mine, an offshore oil rig, aeronautics and defense equipment in the field, a clean room that is disconnected from your other systems for IP protection, a retail outlet, a sailboat on the sea, and the list goes on! What if you could act on insights from IoT sensor data in real time much like our hands act autonomously without depending every time on a round trip to the cloud or enterprise core?

With SAP Edge Services, your mission critical enterprise business processes continue to execute in real time – without dependency on bandwidth, resilient connectivity or round-trip latency all while leveraging hyper-scale and processing power the cloud provides.

SAP Edge Services enables powerful micro-services to be deployed at the edge of computing devices, bringing together compute, storage, business semantics and asynchronous ECC or S4/HANA transactions to the Edge, to take advantage of your IoT data locally. IoT sensor data is enriched with enterprise business context to enable faster decision-making, real-time actions, and business processes to execute uninterrupted, even when temporarily offline. Through a combination of synchronizing architecture, customized persistence and algorithms, SAP Edge Services later synchronizes these transactions with the Digital Core. Much like your hand, your edge can continue to operate autonomously to replenish materials/supplies, execute maintenance work, and maintain project visibility.

Flexible Deployment

SAP Edge Services is developed cloud first and can be delivered as a Software as a Service or on premise. Organizations have a choice of deployment options to suit their needs. SAP Edge Services, cloud edition provides SaaS qualities such as scalability, centralized cloud driven lifecycle management, and frequent innovations via continuous delivery. On-premise customers receive updates on a biannual cycle.

And, now with the latest spring 2018 release, SAP Edge Services capabilities got even better.

Spring 2018 Release Highlights

SAP Edge Services, cloud edition

• Adds support for out-of-the-box integration with SAP Asset Intelligence Network (AIN) to enable AIN data objects such as Manufacturer equipment models and attributes, including measurement thresholds, to be consumed at the edge. Operators can gain faster access to equipment information, operations manuals and other data and documents needed to complete mission-critical tasks to meet their service level agreements.
• Adds REST based APIs for custom edge applications to leverage IoT data stored locally at the edge.
• Expands edge operating system support to include Windows x64 Operating System, in addition to Linux x64 for edge deployments.
• Adds support for off-line data model feature in SAP IoT Services Gateway Edge 4.14+ – When enabled, Edge Services microservices such as streaming and persistency services make use of an optimization to start in cloud-offline mode.

SAP Edge Services, on-premise edition (formerly known as Dynamic Edge Processing)

This release includes the roll-up of several delivered innovations in the cloud edition.

• Adds support for dynamic enterprise business context in rules. This feature allows rules to be configured at the edge, where threshold values are unknown at design time or dynamically changing over time.
• Enables import and export of streaming configurations to rapidly define streaming rules and transfer to multiple edge nodes.
• Supports Asset Intelligence Network (AIN) integration with Edge Services Business Essential Functions microservices, to enable AIN data objects ((such as Manufacturer equipment models and attributes, including measurement thresholds) consumption at the edge.

As a reminder, as of the release of the 18.03 feature pack, SAP Dynamic Edge Processing has been renamed to SAP Edge Services, on premise edition.

For more information, please visit our webpage at SAP.com and check out our videos below.

Extending your Intelligent Enterprise to the edge, with SAP Edge Services – Overview video

Team Akzonobel leverages Leonardo IoT Edge in Volvo Ocean Race for competitive advantage at sea

SAP Edge Services for Connected Assets- Extend SAP Asset Intelligence Network to the edge 

Subha Ramachandran serves as Chief Product Owner SAP Leonardo IoT Edge | SAP Edge Services at SAP.