SAP Leonardo IoT solution focuses on compatibility

German software powerhouse SAP announced Internet of Things (IoT) for Leonardo at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2019.

The new platform will allow enterprises to grow revenue, increase productivity and improve the experience for customers, by analyzing data captured through a variety of IoT sources in conjunction with SAP applications.  

“[Leonardo IoT] is an all-encompassing platform for IoT, a platform-as-a-service solution, with the goal to support the business transformation of our customers,” Elvira Wallis, SAP Leonardo IoT senior vice president, told CRN in an interview.

SAP hopes the platform will help customers transform business models. It will enable customers to embed IoT into line-of-business (LoB) solutions, enhance business applications with IoT technology, and develop new business models based on the new data the IoT solutions generate.

“SAP delivers valuable insight and drives business results by embedding IoT data into business processes,” added Wallis. “The combination of IoT and our depth and breadth of high-value industry and application expertise helps customers gain greater business value and a stronger competitive advantage.”

In addition, the company announced the cloud-to-cloud interoperability of this solution with Microsoft Azure IoT Hub, providing customers a choice of connectivity and device management.

According to a blog post, Leonardo will leverage Azure IoT services, including Azure IoT Hub and Azure IoT Edge, to provide access to market-leading secure connectivity, powerful Device Management functionality and a global scale data ingestion engine.

This joint solution will enable the application to fully manage the physical assets in a secure manner while streaming the data they produce to SAP’s business applications.

As a result, customers can extend their SAP enterprise business processes to the edge, reducing their dependency on latency, bandwidth or connectivity, while creating immersive business experiences that are highly responsive and contextually aware.

“Aristoteles, Kaiserwetter’s data-as-a-service platform, uses the power of SAP Leonardo IoT to enable our customers to maximize the technical and financial performance of renewable energies and other infrastructure portfolios,” said Hanno Schoklitsch, CEO of Kaiserwetter.

“By helping our customers to minimize their investment risks and to increase transparency, we foster investments in sustainability and make a game-changing contribution to global climate protection.”

According to Sam George, Director of Azure IoT at Microsoft, the Internet of Things (IoT) arena has expanded the world of computing far beyond mobile and PC, bringing a new and ever-growing class of cloud-connected devices that is on track to reach 20 billion devices by 2020.

“IoT is transforming industries from agriculture to retail, leveraging emerging technologies including AI, Mixed Reality, edge computing, 5G, and more to not only accelerate business but to also address societal issues like improving our global food supply, reducing energy use, and waste,” he added.

To date, Microsoft boasts one of the fastest growing IoT partner ecosystems in the market, with 10,000 IoT partners developing intelligent edge to intelligent cloud and 1,500 IoT solutions built by partners.