During the 2017 SAPPHIRE NOW conference SAP
told the stunned audience about how they connected some dots to create better
value and more intelligent business applications for their customers.
In essence SAP lifted the veil on how the
company will go ahead with two technologies that will dominate the next years
and that are ordinarily treated as different topics.
But which, in essence, are like yin and
yang.
I talk about AI and machine learning on one
hand, and IoT on the other.
SAP has been fairly quiet on the former and
fairly vocal on the latter, although the first announcement was about machine
learning powered intelligent business applications, back in November 2016.
At that time SAP announced the availability of the machine learning platform
for SAPPHIRE NOW 2017.
After this, SAP announced SAP Leonardo, the
bundling of their IoT portfolio back in January 2017.
On day 1 of SAPPHIRE NOW SAP delivered on
the November promise by announcing “it’s time for machine learning to take the
work out of your work flow. It’s time for billions of devices to go from
thinking, to doing. It’s time for SAP Leonardo, the SAP system for digital
innovation.’
With this approach they even go beyond only
connecting two technologies but they also add Blockchain, Big Data, Data
Intelligence and Analytics into one single platform. Whereas one could argue
that Big Data, Data Intelligence and Analytics are essentially the same.
With this powerful combination, as Holger Mueller, Principal Analyst of
Constellation Research, aptly observed, ‘technology for the first time can do
more than business best practices want’.
To accommodate for this, SAP added
consulting elements into the new Leonardo brand.
This makes SAP Leonardo more of a toolkit
than an actual solution, but a toolkit that SAP proved to help solving specific
business problems in short times.
In the words of Mala Anand, president for
SAP Leonardo: “SAP Leonardo is our brand variety but to deliver transformation
at scale we need more than IT so we’ve expanded SAP Leonardo to be our digital
innovation system that will help you, confidently, redefine your business for
this digital world.”
My Take
A brilliant move.
As I already indicated, AI and IoT are like
Yin and Yang. They are facets of the same thing. While current ‘things’ are
mainly sensors they are creating a tremendous amount of data that needs to be
analysed for the patterns that allow for intelligent action and reaction. This
massive amount of data also explains why SAP moved Big Data, Data Intelligence
and Analytics into SAP Leonardo.
In not so far future these ‘things’ will
not only be sensors but also be actuators, means take action – self-driving
cars are only the most discussed theme here. There will be many more. This is
where the ‘things’ start the doing. And many of these ‘things’ will be inside
the boundary of companies, SAP’s core domain.
Although SAP also moves into consumer
technologies, e.g. automated
cars.
Finally, SAP added Blockchain into the mix.
This really rounds off the tool kit, as it is a security technology that is
geared for establishing trust – first between systems and then by making the
systems trustworthy to humans. More mature security technology is delivered via
the SAP Cloud Platform that is the foundation of SAP Leonardo.
With this set of technologies plus a
methodology around them that helps in solving problems fast, SAP has something
at hand that can hardly be overestimated.
At this time I do not see the other big
business application vendors having something of similar capability at hand,
not Oracle, not Salesforce, even not Microsoft, which is probably closest to be
there.
Now, after these glowing words there of
course are some buts.
The first one is that there now can be some
confusion about what SAP Leonardo stands for. Originally
it was about ‘connecting intelligent devices with people and processes to
achieve tangible business outcomes’. Now it is far more, and not only a
technology anymore. While this shift is in my eyes straightforward, I would
expect that it still needs some education.
The second, and more important one, being
that there are countless other IoT platforms out there in the market. There
hasn’t been much of standardization yet and interoperability between those
platforms is also still in its infancy. And SAP still has the reputation of
being hard to work with, which is a clear inhibitor on the way to becoming the
leading dog in this market. Similarly for the Blockchain technology. There are
quite some groups of companies trying to get into a dominant position, with
inter-group interoperation being very limited.
On the other hand there are only few
companies that can move with a similar thrust. One of them being Google, who
just announced during the Google I/O conference that they will weave
AI and machine learning into their products, around 2 billion of which
happen to be the ‘things’ called smartphones. And Google has quite some
interesting consumer use cases.
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