How SAP will help enable the Internet of Things

[Former Member]

Today at Mobile World Congress Suhas Uliyar, SAP, Global Vice President and Solutions Leader for SAP's Internet of Things Strategy shared his views on machine-to-machine and Internet of Things.  The Internet of Things such as smart cities, connected vending machines, connected cars and smart homes will change the way we live our lives today and open new business scenarios for companies across industries like Utilities, Retail, Automotive, Public Sector and Healthcare. He discussed SAP’s vision of the Internet of Things and how SAP’s solution will help enterprises uncover wisdom from the mountains of data in the connected world.

You can see it now at http://events.sap.com/mobile-world-congress/en/session/4419

For a transcription of the session, you can read the following:

(Ian) Welcome Suhas, thank you for being with us. How are you part of this M2M thing we keep hearing so much about

(Suhas) Thank you for having me. I recently joined SAP as the General Manager for M2M solutions in the Mobile business. I am really excited to be leading this business as I believe that at the core of M2M SAP has the three key elements Mobility, Big Data and the Cloud required to make SAP the leader in M2M solutions.

(Ian) There are a lot of buzz words such as Internet of Things,  Internet of Everything, Networked Society, SmarterPlanet. Are these all the same?

(Suhas) There are pretty much the same. Fundamentally all of these terms refer to connecting the physical world to people and information creating new insights and interactions never like before. Some examples of these are your thermostat controlled via your phone or your car on the internet. As you dig into the specifics there is a difference in approach as some are approaching it from a networking perspective, from a system integration perspective. What differentiates our approach is that we are building on top of what we have with mobility, big data and cloud and we are the only vendor in this space that has this focus and bringing this all together.

(Ian) I thought M2M is all about consumers. What is SAP as an enterprise software vendor doing in this space?

(Suhas) While there are several examples of M2M / IoT products for the consumers, we believe the consumerization of IT will also follow to the world of M2M just like iPhone, Android made its way to the enterprise. There will be over 50B devices connected by 2020 on the network and many of these devices such as plant equipment, containers, vending machines, cars will be enterprise specific. There is a tremendous opportunity beyond mobile phones and tablets to securely manage and monitor all these end points with SAP Afaria – our mobile security product. Supplementing this Mobility management, SAP HANA provides the best big data infrastructure to handle large volumes of data that are streamed from “things” so as to make intelligent choice through the use of analytics. This enables smart vending machines to decide when to alert the “supply chain” as to when they need to be replenished as well as correlating the data with weather information! visualize and interact with the data via mobile applications and analytics.

(Ian) Haven’t business been doing this for a while?

(Suhas) Machine-to-Machine (M2M) technology has been around for years. Industries like oil & gas, transportation and logistics management rely on it to keep us safe but these deployments are not widespread and have been targeted at high value assets. They are a few key trends that is driving broad adoption of M2M. Following Moore’s law the cost of sensors has dropped to the point that it’s commercially viable to put them everywhere (think light bulbs) and the ubiquity of low-cost wireless networks has made communication with this Internet of Things (IoT) technically feasible.

Forward-looking businesses are realizing the tremendous potential of connecting this physical world. Enterprises are able to enhance and optimize today’s operations by increasing efficiency and reduce cost of resources, improve quality and safety. M2M is also enabling new ways of doing business such as dynamic pricing and allowing new customer interactions to engage end users.

Lastly, technology innovations like SAP HANA provide insights that were impossible to calculate given the huge amount of data from these end points. Now with SAP HANA, enterprises can go from reactive sense and respond to predict and act at unbelievable speed and scale.

(ian) Lets say I am an Oil & Gas company. What can SAP do for me?

(Suhas) O & G companies care about 3 things – improving efficiency, improved safety for employees and the rest of us and improved knowledge capture. By hooking up sensors to their oil rigs and transmitting real time data to SAP in the cloud, we can use predictive modeling to anticipate a potential failure before something breaks. This is a huge win for everyone. This means the oil rig never goes down and it means we are all safer for it.