The Power of SAP IoT : Thingalytics, Thinganomics and Linking Apps to Assets

By Dr. John Bates, CEO of Plat.One

We’re delighted to have announced that Plat.One is now part of SAP. As many of you might know, Plat.One is a leader in the IoT Application Enablement Platform space. We make it easy to rapidly build IoT-enabled apps and we provide powerful run-time services to manage and scale those apps. We’re headquartered in the SF Bay Area, with our R&D center in Genoa, Italy. Plat.One had a number of customers in the Smart City space, the connected products space, the smart logistics space and the connected farming space.

Now what, you might ask, could a 77,000 person software goliath want with a small IoT startup? Well it just so happens that our technology is pretty good and our team, staffed by IoT technology experts and thought leaders, is not bad either. SAP, very smartly, are always looking for ways to accelerate their roadmap to get new technologies in the hands of customers as quickly as possible. And Bjoern Goerke and his team want SAP HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) to be the leader in enabling the rapid development and support of IoT-enabled apps. So SAP did an exhaustive search of the market, decided Plat.One was the company of choice, wooed us and we fell in love. But we’re really at the beginning of the story – and it’s a story with much exciting potential.

So what is it that SAP likes about Plat.One? Well some of the characteristics of Plat.One that will help accelerate the HCP roadmap are:

  • It’s a Babel Fish for Machines – Plat.One has the ability to talk to a wide variety of machines – from factory floors, to smart cities, to connected products. This is possible through our support for 40+ machine protocols and the ability to learn new ones rapidly.
  • It’s Edgy – Plat.One has an architecture that works cooperatively across the Edge and the Cloud backend. Of course the cloud is a given with HCP, but managing devices in certain environments also often requires edge services working hand-in-hand with cloud services. The “Edge“ means running close to devices – on routers or gateways for example – to be able to connect and manage IoT devices locally. At the Edge it may be necessary to run disconnected from the cloud for a period (e.g. a mining truck with patchy connectivity) or perform local analytics and filtering before sending data to the cloud (e.g. when sending data over a low power SIGFOX or LoRa network). Plat.One Cloud and Edge services are implemented in a micro-services based container architecture that allows intelligent placement of capabilities at the edge and/or in the cloud depending on application requirements.
  • It can Futureproof your Apps – A rich semantic data model supports virtualizing “Things” as business objects. This enabes apps to be “futureproofed“ because they are not hard-wired to specific protocols and device details. The platform manages the underlying complexity of this device virtualization.
  • Easy Authoring – Plat.One has a graphical plug-and-play development environment for IoT apps – which radically simplifies the process of building apps

But for us from Plat.One, the prospect that really excites us is the opportunity that SAP has in the market. And we want to be part of the mission to be the leader in IoT. There are several opportunities in which we believe SAP is incredibly well placed, including:

  • Thingalytics – This is the name of my book published last year, which talks about the need to converge IoT with Big Data Analytics to deliver smart environments, whether they be cities, logistics operations, retailers or factories. It’s critical that IoT data is analyzed in real-time with streaming analytics to spot anomalies and opportunities. It’s critical predictive analytics and machine learning is used to learn about how IoT systems usually work and then identify when things are not as they should be. And it’s critical to be able to capture, visualize and investigate IoT data. SAP has all these capabilities with streaming data services, predictive analytics, SAP HANA and much, much more. The fact these will all be seamlessly integrated with IoT capabilities in HCP, enables SAP to truly deliver on the Thingalytics vision.
  • Linking Apps to Assets – Consider the existing SAP applications in the market – such as Enterprise Management, Financial Management and Supply Chain Management. All of these applications are based on models of what is happening in the real world. Now we can link those models to the real world assets they describe. For example, imagine modeling depreciation in a financial model. Now we can understand and value assets based on how they are used – rather than theory. This saves money, reduces risk and increases accuracy in business management. But for SAP it is a revolutionary new capability in the market that can be applied to 320,000 application customers.
  • Thinganomics – This is the term I coined from Things + Economics – to discuss the economic benefits of IoT. One of the biggest reasons that companies are resistant to starting IoT projects is that they don’t understand the economic benefits – in terms of new revenue opportunities, disrupting competitors, optimizing operations or saving money. It’s critical to understand what kinds of Thinganomic benefits a project can generate. And who better than SAP to lead the way in describing, measuring and proving Thinganomic benefits to our customer.

Plat.One is a small, yet important, piece in accelerating SAP’s roadmap. The big picture looks very promising. Uniquely in the market, SAP can win a whole new range of customers and partners and supercharge the apps of existing customers and partners – to link to assets, deliver Thingalytics and produce Thinganomic benefits. Bring it on! Plat.One is reporting for duty!

 

PLAT.ONE announces acquisition by SAP

Plat.One’s leading IoT platform will be integrated into SAP’s Hana Cloud Platform

Palo Alto, CA – September 28, 2016 – PLAT.ONE (www.plat.one), the leading enterprise-grade Internet of Things (IoT) solution platform, today announced its acquisition by SAP SE.

PLAT.ONE’s IoT platform enables the rapid development and scalable management of enterprise IoT environments, including connected products, smart cities, connected transport and smart manufacturing.

Dr. John Bates, CEO of PLAT.ONE, said, “It is a great testimony to the PLAT.ONE team and technology that SAP selected PLAT.ONE to become a key part of its IoT offering. We believe this acquisition further strengthens and solidifies SAP’s position as the global leader in the connected business space and we’re excited to be part of that opportunity.”

SAP’s IoT approach enables IoT development and runtime services through the Hana Cloud Platform (HCP) – to make it easy for enterprises and system integrators to build IoT-enabled applications. SAP utilizes HCP to build its own IoT solutions to accelerate deployment of particular IoT use cases for customers. HCP also empowers SAP’s partner ecosystem, enabling partners to populate the SAP Hana Application Center marketplace with IoT-enabled solutions.

Bjoern Goerke, EVP of Product and Innovation Technology, SAP said, “We conducted a review of IoT platforms in the market and found PLAT.ONE to be a strong leader, particularly in device interoperability, edge processing capabilities, and development capabilities. It is great to add these leading capabilities to SAP HCP.”

Filippo Murroni, Founder and CTO of PLAT.ONE, added, “We are delighted to be part of SAP. We’ve done amazing things as a start-up and now we look forward to contributing strategically to a much larger business!”

About PLAT.ONE

PLAT.ONE is the leading enterprise-grade IoT solutions platform. By simplifying the process of creating, deploying and managing complex IoT solutions, PLAT.ONE radically shortens time-to-value for IoT applications and significantly reduces the cost of their management. Specifically, PLAT.ONE enables:

  • Complex device connectivity and management across a wide number of industry standard machine and messaging protocols.
  • A micro-services-based adaptive architecture that can adapt to run logic on the device, at the edge or in the cloud, depending on the solution requirements.
  • A semantic data model that futureproofs applications by abstracting sets of underlying sensors and devices as “IoT business objects”, such as trucks or street lamps.
  • Pre-built Solution Accelerators for a number of different IoT use cases, including smart cities, connected products and smart transportation.

About SAP

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable approximately 320,000 business and public sector customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com

For more information please contact:
Justin Fry
Plat.one
(415) 997 6200
[email protected]
www.plat.one

For customers interested in learning more about SAP products:
Global Customer Center: +49 180 534-34-24

United States only: 1 (800) 872-1SAP (1-800-872-1727)

For more information, press only:
SAP News Center press room; [email protected]