IoT - what it really is?

Everything was better in the past? Maybe, but under ex-SAP CEO Professor Henning Kagermann there would never have been such an air act.

SAP CEO Bill McDermott, on the other hand, is a salesman, not a techie, so it's more about strategic positioning in the billion-dollar IoT market than concrete answers.

Professor Kagermann was, of course, also in Frankfurt/M as the father of Industry 4.0 and head of Acatech (German Academy of Science and Engineering).

SAP has correctly recognized the importance of IoT and Industry 4.0 and has given an initial marketing response with Leonardo - nothing more! Visions and promises as well as possibilities were presented in Frankfurt/M.

The just over 1000 visitors were disappointed. In general, the question is whether SAP will ever be able to deliver added value here. Currently, Crisp Research analyst Stefan Ried says:

"SAP claims a broad range of IoT services with Leonardo."

Does an IoT user need SAP?

Probably not, because IoT is: sensors, M2M communication, edge computing and new business processes in the smart factory (see also E-3 cover story July/August 2017).

Thousands of sensors in thousands of CNC machines generate millions of data, but these do not make their way into the main memory of a Hana machine in "real time", which means you won't need Hana either! The answer is edge computing.

Due to the latency time, the IoT sensor data is sorted, verified and consolidated directly at the point of action. A rather small data stream then goes towards the ERP system, is visualized there and processed further - and any Windows server with an SQL database or AWS and Google in the cloud can also manage this.

You can read a comprehensive analysis and follow-up coverage from the SAP Leonardo in-house exhibition in the upcoming E-3 Magazine September 2017.