SAP has joined the Industrial Internet Consortium, a body formed to accelerate and promote the business use of IoT.
The Industrial Internet Consortium is an open membership organisation formed to accelerate the development, adoption and widespread use of interconnected machines and devices, intelligent analytics and people at work. It was founded by AT&T, Cisco, General Electric, IBM and Intel in March 2014 and how has a membership of over 140 comprised of major technology companies, industrial end-users, government bodies and academics.
SAP says it is working closely with the more than 140 other Industrial Internet Consortium members to deliver use cases, test beds, reference architecture and frameworks and security.
“SAP helps customers implement practical business solutions with a wide variety of cloud-based IoT solutions that include the SAP Predictive Maintenance and Service solution, SAP Connected Logistics software and SAP Manufacturing Execution application,” the company said.” (SAP received a 2014 M2M Evolution IoT Excellence Award for its IoT connected trade asset intelligence software)
SAP solutions for IoT are powered by the SAP HANA cloud platform, an application development and enablement platform that, according to SAP, “enables enterprises to generate real-time insights from sensor data and advanced features such as in-memory computing and geo-spatial functionality … [and] supports telematics, predictive analytics and complex event processing. In addition, SAP HANA cloud platform offers open APIs that allow third-party providers to develop IoT applications.”
According to SAP, “A key component will be the influence that Industrial Internet Consortium will bring to various IoT standards activities and solutions for driving interoperability of the growing involvement of virtually every major open standards organisation.” SAP said.
It adds: “Industrial Internet Consortium is also working closely with the German Industry 4.0 initiative to bring global input and help ensure that Industry 4.0 leverages the work of Industrial Internet Consortium in its solutions for computerisation of the manufacturing industry.”
SAP says it has been a strong supporter of the Industry 4.0 in Europe and supports the importance of industry-wide, international standards for easier interoperability for customers.
Industry 4.0 originated as a forward-looking project under the German Government’s High-Tech Strategy. It focussed on information and communication technology (informatics) and has been developed further to include production research and user industries. According to Wikipedia it is now a generic collective term for technologies and concepts of value chain organisation.
