As the Gartner research reveals the Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most active areas for innovation, where they see startups competing with traditional giants to bring IoT products to business and consumers. McKinsey estimates that IoT has a potential economic impact of $3.9 trillion to $11.1 trillion per year in 2025. It is estimated that 70 percent will come from B2B applications. Their findings also suggest that the hype may actually understate the full potential—but that capturing it will require an understanding of where real value can be created and a successful effort to address a set of systems issues, including interoperability.
SAP recently announced that it was to put an even stronger focus on IoT and Industry 4.0, boosting our customer innovations and that I was to head up the new unit (IoT& Customer Innovation) and I have to say it has been extremely busy ever since!
With customer meetings, workshops and events like the SAP Executive Summit, Internet of Things, held on September 16–17 in Berlin with more than a 100 customers. They talked about the challenges they are facing as they move to a networked economy and what opportunities IoT can bring to their business, and this is where SAP comes in. I firmly believe SAP is in a unique position to succeed as a market and thought leader and spearhead innovation in this area because of our customer base, the breadth and depth of our industry knowledge, the best practices we have in different lines of business and our unique ability to create a closed loop of thing, to insight to action.
Our customers trust us and are ready to invest, and co-innovate with us as we develop our IoT solutions. When setting out to define the future, we must remember the roots of our past. Closely working with customers and partners, putting the end user middle and center has always been our strength and will continue to be a key operating principle of this new unit.
SAP also knows that nurturing an open ecosystem is critical to being successful in this vast landscape of IoT that is why we are committed to build out existing partnerships and create new ones with startups, mature companies, and research institutes.
To this end, we will continue to leverage and develop our open extensibility platform, the SAP HANA Cloud Platform for IoT, which provides the infrastructure to enable businesses to securely tap into a network of millions of connected devices as well as use and build on its existing data and application services, such as predictive analytics, telematics, geo-location and more. IoT services from SAP will continue to support cost-efficient and quick solution development, deployment and operations.
Encouragingly, with existing solutions like predictive maintenance, connected manufacturing, connected logistics, and vehicle insights, SAP has already shown initial success with customers. With these and other large customers within these scenarios, SAP will define and refine its innovation and product portfolio.
So watch this space! You are going to see some great things coming out of SAP and the new IoT & Customer Innovation team, especially as we get closer to Tech Ed in Vegas and Barcelona.
http://events.sap.com/teched-2015-usa/en/home
http://events.sap.com/teched-2015-emea/en/home
Dr. Tanja Rueckert
EVP IoT & Customer Innovation
