On January 10, 2017, SAP announced
a bundling of their IoT portfolio of initiatives to focus on business outcomes
instead of technology while combining the set of emerging products and
solutions under the brand name Leonardo – as in Leonardo Da Vinci,
one of the most forward looking artists and innovators ever. This announcement
substantiates SAPs
commitment to invest two billion Euro in IoT over the next 5 years.
The new portfolio will combine adaptive
applications, big data and connectivity as packaged line-of-business solutions,
covering a range of topics. It bases upon a rebranded – and repackaged(?) HANA
Cloud Platform, enhanced by the micro services for machine learning that were announced
earlier and which I covered here.
This enhanced platform is now called SAP Cloud Platform.
As per a blog
post accompanying the Leonardo announcement, the high level architecture of
SAPs new offering looks like below and covers, besides a set of existing applications
·
an IoT adapter – SAP Leonardo
for Edge Computing – which serves as a device independent data input layer,
essentially a kind of middleware, probably built on or using HCI.
·
a foundational layer – SAP
Leonardo Foundation – which includes the IoT business services that are to be
exposed, enabling rapid development of applications. This makes up the
functional core.
·
and a ‘bus’ layer – SAP
Leonardo Bridge – which enables the combination of real time data with
applications and processes
Leonardo High Level Architecture - Source: SAP
Leonardo is accompanied by a jump-start
enablement program to accompany this initiative. This program includes
introductory pricing and is intended to help organizations identify and
validate IoT pilots and use cases, including expert staffing and using design
thinking methodologies, thus easing the first IoT steps. Of course there will
be a launch event to bring together customers, partners, and experts,
showcasing innovations and strategies.
According to Tanja Rueckert, EVP Digital Assets
and IoT SAP with Leonardo connects “things with business processes […] and with
people”.
My Take
This was long overdue.
Overdue not only from SAP, but from any and
every vendor. IoT is a means, not an end!
As Brent
Leary very recently said in a podcast
with SearchCRM, IoT is still trying to make its way to provide value for
businesses. This is imho due to the IoT market being vendor- and technology
driven. SAP now takes the lead in tightly integrating technology into business
process, and to show a clear path to business value. This fits neatly into the
core of SAPs overall value proposition as an enterprise software company and it
nicely combines numerous technologies and services that have been developed by
SAP in the past years into a holistic piece that can deliver business value. I
see this mainly as a rebranding instead of something net new, although there
are some new pieces to this solution portfolio. This is also a bit of a
concern. SAP now needs to keep up the momentum and deliver new intelligent, IoT
based business solutions.
What is interesting is the (important)
combination of IoT and machine learning, which is mentioned only in the blog
post, and which has the potential to make a real difference, e.g., when it
comes to distributed intelligence.
As a final word of caution, SAP only
announced introductory promotional pricing. This means that there are still
important open questions about pricing overall, which should be a worry for
customers.
However, overall this is good news for
customers, as with this portfolio of services and technology every IoT
investment can be tied to a business case and then business value. I expect
that other big vendors
SAP clearly takes a thought leadership
position here, if not a technology leadership position.
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