Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: David Parker, Global Vice President, SAP (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What has that got to do with IoT?

David Parker: When you look at IoT, my view of IoT is just another data artifact. Unfortunately, the market does get hung up on terminologies. It was Big Data a couple of years ago. Before that, you had enterprise service architectures. There’s always a terminology. The term that’s right right now is Internet of Things.

Sramana Mitra: That’s not true. Big Data and Internet of Things are not the same. They may be interrelated. Big Data works from data and data can be generated from a lot of things. It doesn’t have to be generated from Internet of Things.

David Parker: This is the point. I’m talking the hype. The hype was that Big Data came along – big volumes of data, velocity of data, variety of data. After that, IoT became a component of that as it relates to the thing itself. It started with machine to machine, which has been in the industry for many, many years. If you go to manufacturing industry, they’ve been trying to monitor their assets internally for many years. You go to a field operator such as electricity and utilities. They’ve been trying to analyze that data for many years by putting sensors. Going back to RFID technology, which was in the late 1990s and early 2000s, that stuff is not new. That’s what I meant.

The perceptions, or at least of what IoT stands for, has been around for a while. What has changed is the individual sensors, the capabilities of those sensors, and the small footprint of those sensors. They’ve become much cheaper. They’ve become much more robust and more functional, and a lot easier to access.

RFID technology was considered somewhat cumbersome. It was extremely expensive and not readily deployable for the SME market. It was the high profile customers like Department of Defense and those kinds of public sector agencies. What we now see today and where SAP is interested is that I can put a sensor on anything. It could be a toothbrush. It could be a coffee machine. It could be the suspension structure of a car. It could be a washing machine. Anything you can think of can now have a sensor applied to it. Because of that, it becomes a thing that I can connect to and I can acquire data from.

The next question then becomes, “What type of data do I acquire? What’s the relevance and frequency of that data that I need to monitor?” When you look at assets in manufacturing, transportation, and other high-tech industries, an asset is a very important component of how the company runs its business. I need to understand how I can take data off that asset. Planting a sensor to that asset allows me to provide that real-time visibility. We’re moving from the so-called world of reactive to moving to predictive, and moving from batch to real-time as soon as something happens. From a SAP standpoint, what we’re seeing is, our customers want to leverage that asset data—call it Internet of Things data—which comes in different formats, at any speed, and at any volume. 20 billion devices up to 75 billion devices connected by 2020. That, in itself, means that there’s a lot of data that can be consumed, and has to be contextualized.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: David Parker, Global Vice President, SAP
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