The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming mainstream. Companies are seeing market-making benefits from IoT and deploying at scale – from transforming operations and logistics, remote monitoring, and predictive maintenance at the edge to new consumer experiences powered by connected devices. In all of these solutions, IoT data and AI are producing powerful insights that lead to new opportunities.
Today at MWC 2019, we’re announcing that Microsoft and SAP are extending our partnership to IoT. SAP Leonardo IoT will integrate with Azure IoT services providing our customers with the ability to contextualize and enrich their IoT data with SAP business data within SAP Leonardo IoT to drive new business outcomes.
Microsoft has collaborated with SAP for over two decades to enable enterprise SAP solution deployments which include Azure, Windows Server, and SQL Server. Microsoft and SAP have also collaborated in the Industrial Internet Consortium, the OPC Foundation, and the Plattform Industrie 4.0 for many years, jointly helping to define and build products on open industrial interoperability and security standards. Last fall, we also announced the Open Data Initiative with SAP and Adobe, designed to eliminate data silos and deliver world-class customer experiences.
Now SAP and Microsoft are expanding their partnership to physical devices and assets with a new collaboration in the IoT space. As part of this partnership, SAP Leonardo IoT will leverage services from Azure IoT, including Azure IoT Hub and Azure IoT Edge, to provide access to secure connectivity at scale, powerful device management functionality, and industry-leading edge computing support.
By harnessing the power of Microsoft Azure IoT and SAP Leonardo IoT, we provide our customers with the ability to intelligently combine business data to provide industrial IoT capabilities and services to be consumed by SAP business applications. This provides our joint customers with a complete view on their data from physical assets to business processes to customer relationships and offers a full digital feedback loop.
As part of this partnership, we’ll also enable customers to seamlessly extend their SAP solution-based business processes to the Azure IoT Edge platform. Using SAP Essential Business Functions from SAP Leonardo IoT Edge, customers will have the ability to opt for Microsoft Azure IoT Edge as a runtime environment for SAP Leonardo IoT Edge Essential Business Functions. Deployed on enterprise-ready certified devices, leveraging the highly secure Azure IoT Edge platform, customers can reduce their dependency on latency, bandwidth, or connectivity while creating immersive business experiences that are highly responsive and contextually aware.
To learn more, read today’s announcement from SAP.