In January, SAP moved to bundle its offerings for IoT under the brand name Leonardo. Jump forward just several months later to this week's Sapphire Now conference, and the vision has already grown much broader.
What you might call 'Leonardo 2.0' now encompasses IoT, machine learning, analytics, big data, design thinking services and blockchain, all built atop SAP's cloud platform. Customers who adopt SAP Cloud Platform won't be tied to SAP data centers for the underlying infrastructure, as the company has inked partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform as well.
The new Leonardo is SAP's "digital innovation system," and the basis for the company's drive into digital transformation projects. Digital transformation was the central theme of this year's Sapphire, and where SAP sees ample opportunity for growth as customers not only migrate older ERP environments to the new S/4HANA, but look to adopt the leading-edge technologies targeted by Leonardo.
SAP is shipping a number of industry accelerators—fixed-priced products composed of services and subscription licenses—for Leonardo, aimed initially at retail, sports organizations, consumer products and discrete manufacturing.
For sure, Leonardo is an apt title for what the product set stands to offer customers, with its evocation of renaissance man Leonardo Da Vinci. It also raises the bar high for SAP to deliver customer success, of course, given how much Leonardo projects will depend not only on technology but professional services from SAP and partners.
Some may question whether quickly broadening Leonardo's remit so far beyond IoT could create market confusion, but Sapphire provides the biggest platform of the year for SAP to educate customers on its product strategy. In any event, it's far from clear how much penetration the original Leonardo vision had made among the installed base.
SAP is making the right move with the new incarnation of Leonardo because it sketches out a clearer picture of what a digital business ought to be, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland.
"There will be a lot of CIOs who will be grateful for the clarity this new version of SAP Leonardo provides towards potential a proof-of-concept deployment of IoT and AI in the enterprise," he says. "Describing SAP Leonardo as adding systems of intelligence to to the traditional SAP systems of record will help the general market confusion as to exactly how to view the role of IoT and AI in enterprise digital business, as well as positioning Leonardo as an architecrure and a platform for ongoing development."
"The numbers and importance of the partners who have expressed commitment to supporting SAP Leonardo suggests that they too feel this is an important and radical move in the marketplace," Mulholland adds. "Constellation Research advises SAP customers to take a detailed look, and suggests non-SAP customers may also find the platform interesting too."
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