With more enterprises seeing the potential for applications using the Internet of Things (IoT), SAP has established a new product and development unit to bring together its activities in this area.
The Internet of Things and Customer Innovation unit will focus on broadening SAP’s IoT applications, including the SAP Vehicle Insights application, SAP Predictive Maintenance and Service solution, and SAP Connected Logistics package.
SAP is taking a collaborative approach in this area, developing IoT solutions through co-innovation with customers and partners, which helps to define new offerings based on requirements and challenges observed in the market.
“SAP is in a unique position to succeed as an IoT market and thought leader, and spearhead innovation in this area,” said Tanja Rueckert, EVP, Internet of Things and Customer Innovation, SAP. “Our broad customer base, ongoing co-innovation with customers and partners, breadth and depth of industry knowledge, and unique ability to create a closed loop of ‘thing to insight to action’ allow us to bring together in a meaningful way the business context from the transaction system (IT) and the operational context from machine-generated data (OT) to deliver value to our customers.”
SAP showcased some examples of this collaboration at this week’s SAP TechEd conference in Las Vegas. The company worked with Indian multinational Tech Mahindra on a pilot project to develop an intelligent electric vehicle charging system using SAP HANA. The application can monitor charging stations, electric vehicle usage, driving patterns, transformers and overall grid performance, to monitor and analyse the electric load placed on the system in real time, schedule charging to avoid bottlenecks, and assess grid reliability.
Prateek Saxena, director at an internal startup funded by Tech Mahindra, which spearheaded the project, said it aimed to help energy companies assess the challenges and opportunities of charging electric vehicles, will the aim of speeding technology adoption.
“Clean tech is maturing and adopting proven management practices, and we have been a strong advocate of the same, focusing our efforts towards delivering a positive and actionable project that will help our customers adapt to digital technologies effectively,” said Saxena.
