Focusing on IoT (Internet of Things), enterprise application software company, SAP, has launched new tools, which will help advance IoT and industry 4.0 strategies across digital logistics, manufacturing and asset management.
The SAP Leonardo IoT Bridge and SAP Leonardo IoT Edge will leverage advancements in Big Data and analytics, the ability to connect people, things and business with SAP Cloud Platform, and technologies such as machine learning.
SAP Leonardo IoT Bridge
SAP Leonardo IoT Bridge is a configurable role-based digital command center giving operations managers’ visibility and ability to act in real time. It claims to offer pre-configured work environments for operations professionals, based on their areas of responsibility, by bringing IoT data together with business data from underlying enterprise applications. It ties IoT and business process data together to provide intelligent business context and real-time visibility across the value chain.
One of the key feature of SAP Leonardo IoT Bridge is the ability to identify unexpected and unplanned events from IoT applications, present it contextually to the operations users and provide them with decision support, including information on trade-offs against service level agreements, cost, and other relevant factors. It also allows users to plan follow-on actions in the underlying enterprise applications by triggering a service API.
For example, if a user has installed several IoT sensors that regularly give alerts about the condition of the product, it amounts to huge amounts of data. SAP Leonardo IoT Bridge can configure these checks using the service APIs from other business systems to decide the impact before surfacing this notification to the end user.
SAP Leonardo IoT Edge
SAP claims that this software will bring compute, storage and business semantics via the cloud to where intelligent devices reside outside of the data center, for near real-time and deterministic performance of business processes. Using the container infrastructure of SAP Cloud Platform IoT services, SAP Leonardo IoT Edge is intended to seamlessly work with other line-of-business solutions.
SAP states that real-time data processing is necessary at the edge of the network where it is being generated. There is a need to capture and analyze this geographically distributed data in the form of actionable insights for better business performance. The company claims that by enabling business context and intelligence at the edge, close to where data originates, SAP Edge Services (a part of SAP Leonardo Edge) addresses latency, bandwidth and cost considerations.
When it comes to geographically distributed data, it also addresses other requirements, such as ownership, geographic regulations, and privacy. It effectively merges the power of the edge and the power of the cloud for near real-time use cases and deterministic performance of business processes.
In an official blog for SAP Edge Services, the company stated that the solution also has the ability to set and distribute policies from the cloud, so that raw data can be enriched with business context at the edge, converted into meaningful insights for decision-making, all while triggering immediate business action without requiring a round-trip to the cloud every time.
“Less than one year ago, we announced our commitment to invest and grow our IoT business. With SAP Leonardo as our digital innovation system, our new solutions and the many customers and partners demonstrating real-life use cases with us at SAP Leonardo Live, we are defining the path to digital transformation with innovation that can scale across the entire organization,” said Tanja Rueckert, President, IoT and Digital Supply Chain, SAP.
Apart from these two tools, the company has launched a host of new IoT solutions at SAP Leonardo Live, its global summit being held from July 11–12 in Frankfurt, Germany.