IIoT: Tracing the True Value

By CIOReview | Tuesday, November 27, 2018

The internet of things (IoT) has achieved a great stimulus since 2010. IoT is now successfully penetrating the field of business and industry, thus giving rise to the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) or Industry 4.0.

The need to integrate data into a single unit of functioning and to enhance the value creation, the IoT has proven to be quite a useful tool. With the extensive application of IoT in industries, the enterprise heads aim at digitization and integration of both the horizontal and vertical value chains of their business, digitization of the products and services available, and create enhanced digital business models. By doing so, the companies will be able to bring business procedures and people under a collaborative canopy of work and even generate intelligent and more efficient supply chains, in the competitive economic realm today. One of the ventures to use IoT is the installation of SAP. This application has taken the business world by a storm, as 70 percent of the business transactions in the world are being meted out through SAP, in over 180 countries. With its increasing demand, SAP has produced a new agenda called Leonardo in 2017. This new application has enabled the restructuring of back-to-back business and transformed it into an intelligent enterprise. Leonardo is responsible for involving different technologies like IoT, analytics, AI, and ML at every juncture of the value chain, thus, creating a network of connected products, assets, fleet, infrastructure, markets, and people. This Omni-connected state will help in the efficient functioning of the enterprise, proper availability and usage of assets, enhance customer experiences, and improve the automated processes, appropriate fleet management, and efficient energy consumption. Leonardo is also helpful in making enterprises digitally capable by the creation of a cloud platform to manage and support micro-services. It also helps enhance in-memory computing capabilities through the SAP HANA data management application. Leonardo also solves the challenges of latency in any company and maintains the complex monolith enterprise software architecture. This application is helpful in computing and swiftly storing data while also decentralizing SAP’s traditional monolith service-oriented architecture to meet the increasing demand for customer specific applications, reached out through the use of micro services.

The integration of data in enterprises through SAP and also digitizing it has enabled business models to be redefined effectively, providing the much-needed business productivity and efficiency, paving a successful path for Industry 4.0.