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Trinidad
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
In our Digital Transformation for SMBs blog series we have covered several technologies that allow SMB companies to imagine new business scenarios. I will like to start a new series of blogs talking about the Internet of Things (IoT) and how you can embed IoT into your line-of-business solutions, enhance business applications with IoT technology, and develop new business models based on your IoT data.

What is Internet of Things? There are many articles around IoT not only from SAP sources or IoT sensors providers on the technical side but also the daily press talks about IoT use cases, IoT is becoming a common word and not anymore a technical buzz word. Costs of sensors have dropped while connectivity has proliferated. The result is that every “thing” (not only industrial equipment but basically every consumer product) can now be connected and sharing data. IoT is not new but becoming more a more a convenient collaborator allowing companies to excel on their business: control and improve productivity, reduce maintenance costs, manage and mitigate risks, …

SAP in the past focused only on the business process that we can call the system of records, this is a core part that companies cannot work without anymore and is somehow assumed. Customers want more now (and not only big companies but also SMB customers), they want to reimagine their business with new models and processes, enable faster changes, change how people work, … they claim Intelligent Solutions!



SAP offers SAP Internet of Things service on the SAP Business Technology Platform as part of the SAP Business Technology Platform Intelligent Technologies. SAP Intelligent Technologies groups together a set of intelligent technologies and services allowing our partners and customers to build intelligent applications and optimize their process and resources. Smart devices generate a massive amount of IoT Data, IoT services need then to collaborate with other services like Big Data, Analytics, Machine Learning, … We need to store, analyze, add context to data and trigger actions without human intervention.

In this blog I’ll like to give a short overview of the services available as part of SAP IoT and how those services can help you develop the IoT solution your customers are expecting, fully integrated with their Systems of records that for SMBs means SAP Business One and/or SAP Business ByDesign. But bear in mind that IoT technologies should be connected to other technologies to build the Intelligent Application consumers need.



SAP IoT is built on top of SAP Business Technology Platform as a multi-cloud platform-as-a-service offering and proposes a set of services at different levels:



  • Data ingestion provides models for representing and validate incoming data.

  • Big Data Storage provides automatic data tiering considering hot, warm and cold storage.

  • Several extra services are provided for onboarding & device management, time series, lifecycle… as well as Master Data and Semantic services giving the possibility to add additional context through enriched master data integration with business partner, geo location and customer master data support.

  • Analytic Services & Query Model provides live data connection to the SAP Analytics Cloud

  • Streaming Rules & Rules on Persisted Data allows fast processing of streaming rules and Rules processing on persisted data.

  • Event Services keep track of time series related event history, severity and status.

  • Action driven business integration to embed IoT in LoB scenarios to provide IoT context to business processes


 

The first step on SAP IoT I would like you to start with, is thinking which kind of processes can be improved at your customers with IoT scenarios? How can you help your customers move forward in their day to they business by facilitating IoT data that can be automatically analyzed and integrated to their business to help them take decisions faster?

You can explore an IoT sample application we developed some years ago for IoT BeaconsOne – A Smart Shop with IoT, B1 and SAP Cloud Platform to get some ideas on business cases.



You can also explore other scenario samples on the SAP Business Technology Platform IoT and other Intelligent services here and of course don’t forget to check our Digital Transformation for SMBs – a blog series for more inspiration and use cases around SAP Business Technology Platform.

A second step will be to investigate further on the SAP IoT capabilities that will help you technically to accomplish it. I’m planning some follow up blogs providing much more technical details on SAP  IoT service (this one is just a warm up overview ;o).

Check the full set SAP IoT blog series:

Don't miss the eLearning SAP IoT – Overview and Hands on Virtual Classes (S-user required) giving you the full picture of the different IoT services and providing hands on exercises!

We have also a recorded session Using BTP to Build IoT Solutions for SAP Business One and SAP Business ByDesign(s-number login required) available.

Stay tuned to learn more, more to come soon!
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