SAP has already outlined an IoT strategy, but it hit the accelerator hard on Wednesday with the announcement of a €2 billion investment in IoT over the next five years. Here are the key details from its announcement.
Part of the plan includes Industrie 4.0 product bundles initially aimed at manufacturing areas such as shop floor operations, manufacturing planning and plant maintnenance. Later, SAP will introduce IoT packages for other domains, such as smart cities, utilities and agriculture.
SAP also revealed the acquisition of PLAT.ONE, "an enterprise-grade IoT provider that simplifies the process of creating, deploying and managing complex IoT solutions:
Founded in northern Italy, PLAT.ONE provides expertise and technology to accelerate the availability of key IoT capabilities in SAP HANA Cloud Platform, such as advanced lifecycle management for IoT devices, broad device connectivity, strong IoT edge capabilities that work seamlessly with a cloud back end, end-to-end role-based security and rapid development tools for IoT applications.
In addition, SAP recently bought a Norweigian company, Fedem Technology, that develops advanced software for monitoring complex mechanial systems:
With this acquisition SAP plans to build an end-to-end IoT solution in which a digital avatar continuously represents the state of operating assets through feeds from sensors, replacing the need for physical inspection with a “digital inspection.”
Finally, SAP intends to create a number of IoT labs around the world:
SAP IoT labs are intended as lighthouse locations and primary access points for IoT research, development, proof-of-concept modeling and incubation, with IoT showcases, thought leadership, expertise and infrastructure for strategy and product co-innovation. Planned locations include Berlin, Johannesburg, Munich, Palo Alto, São Leopoldo and Shanghai.
PLAT.ONE provides SAP with crucial last-mile IoT capabilities that had been sorely lacking in its HANA Cloud Platform. The startup's CEO, Dr. John Bates, described PLAT.ONE's value to SAP in a blog post released in conjunction with the acquisition announcement:
So what is it that SAP likes about Plat.One? Well some of the characteristics of Plat.One that will help accelerate the HCP roadmap are:
It’s a Babel Fish for Machines – Plat.One has the ability to talk to a wide variety of machines – from factory floors, to smart cities, to connected products. This is possible through our support for 40+ machine protocols and the ability to learn new ones rapidly.
It’s Edgy – Plat.One has an architecture that works cooperatively across the Edge and the Cloud backend. Of course the cloud is a given with HCP, but managing devices in certain environments also often requires edge services working hand-in-hand with cloud services. The “Edge“ means running close to devices – on routers or gateways for example – to be able to connect and manage IoT devices locally.
It can Futureproof your Apps – A rich semantic data model supports virtualizing “Things” as business objects. This enabes apps to be “futureproofed“ because they are not hard-wired to specific protocols and device details.
Easy Authoring – Plat.One has a graphical plug-and-play development environment for IoT apps – which radically simplifies the process of building apps
An IoT-related move of this magnitude has been long awaited for by SAP customers and the market, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Andy Mulholland.
"The industry has been waiting for some time for SAP to make a real strategic strategic move and investment in IoT," Mulholland says. "To date, SAP has been content with adding IoT sensing-driven enhancements to its existing enterprise applications suites and gaining the advantage of new data to add to its HANA intelligence processing."
This week's announcement, however, represents a "real commitment to using IoT not just to enhance, but to transform capabilities," Mullholand adds. "Particular points of note are the addition of acquired expertise, the use of labs to work with customers and partners to develop solutions and most interesting of all the capitalization on Industrie 4.0. Working with the European-centric Industrie 4.0 consortium to build solutions allows SAP to tap into the creation of a European power house for the development of SAP. All in all, this is good news for SAP customers everywhere."
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