SAP SE today announced the launch of two new Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, SAP Connected Goods software and the SAP Dynamic Edge Processing server.
These IoT innovations allow SAP customers to connect large volumes of IoT devices and real-time sensor data to core business processes for improved business outcomes including reduced bandwidth costs, greater visibility and insight, and enhanced revenue opportunities.
“With these new IoT solutions, we are enabling a new level of business innovation and operational value from IoT devices practically anywhere, on a mass-market scale, across industries,” said Tanja Rueckert, executive vice president, Digital Assets and IoT, SAP. “By extending SAP’s digital core and processing capabilities to the intelligent edge, where device sensor data originates, enterprises can minimize latency, enhance operational efficiency and accelerate decision making to optimize data-driven insights.”
Trade associations estimate the number of vending machines across Europe alone to exceed 3.74 million, with assets and revenue potential worth billions of euros. With such staggering numbers, companies cannot afford the costly expense of lost sales, missed revenue opportunities or dissatisfied customers resulting from underutilized, inoperable or misplaced devices.
SAP Connected Goods is a cloud-based solution delivered on SAP HANA Cloud Platform that is designed to maximize the value of mass-market devices, such as coolers, vending machines or power tools, through remote monitoring, management and central control. It optimizes device availability, utilization and performance by helping ensure adequate stock levels and proper storage. SAP Connected Goods identifies relevant device trends and usage patterns, relies on rule-based alerts for replenishment of goods, and creates customized dashboards with built-in integration to the SAP BusinessObjects Cloud solution. It addresses a wide range of mass-market devices across outlets ranging from gas stations to retail stores, pharmacies and constructions sites, and enables alternative business models such as product-as-a-service (PaaS) to attract new customers based on product usage preferences and consumer behavior insights.
Data is growing exponentially among the billions of smart devices that connect information, people and things in the digital enterprise. As a result, organizations experience volumes that can overwhelm network bandwidth necessary to route the data back to core processing centers. The most effective way to reduce transmission costs while maintaining the value of real-time insights is to process more data at the edge, where devices reside outside of the data center.
SAP Dynamic Edge Processing supports a secure, managed platform to bridge physical “things” with the business world. It enriches real-time IoT decision making with business context at the intelligent edge, and optimizes operations by making edge assets and workers operate more efficiently. In addition, it filters the most critical data that should be transferred to the core IoT system while handling other data locally where it originates. SAP Dynamic Edge Processing combines algorithms, syncing architecture and optimized database technology with features for device connectivity and onboarding, offline operation, data reduction, local application platforms, immediate response and local storage.
When implemented together, SAP Connected Goods and SAP Dynamic Edge Processing enhance operational efficiency by distributing the processing of data between the edge and the centralized cloud solution. The ability to analyze incoming data, run business rules at the edge and trigger immediate follow-up actions with SAP Dynamic Edge Processing reduces the overall network traffic and improves the quality of data that is sent for processing by SAP Connected Goods, and thus enables better device monitoring.