Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: David Parker, Global Vice President, SAP (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I have a specific question on what is the state of the union that you are seeing in your customer base with SAP. Are there large customers who are connecting up through these RFID/sensor devices with huge numbers of assets? If so, then which industry sectors are they in and, if you are authorized to give some names of customers who are going for big deployment, who are they?

I’ll give you the context of where I’m coming from. The main push back that I hear in the industry is, exposing so many assets to network devices means that there are surface areas that are being opened up to cyber security problems and breaches. If you look at retail for instance, if every item has an RFID device, then the surface area that is exposed to cyber threats is much higher. Based on my earlier conversations, there’s actually quite a bit of resistance in large customers to roll out Internet of Things. My question to you is what are you seeing from SAP’s vantage point?

David Parker: There has to be a compelling reason or event for any firm to engage on an IoT project. Clearly, we’re seeing them at the larger, high-end, particularly in manufacturing and in the high-tech companies like industrial machines and automotive for predictive maintenance. There’s an initiative coming out of Germany. There’s a huge compelling event there for the manufacturing companies in Germany to have global footprint to take on board the Internet of Things initiative. Yes, I agree that there is much more of a mess network. If you look at these the numbers about billions of devices connected, you’re now going to be faced with a tsunami of data that you have to manage and control based on a security standpoint and a data privacy and policy standpoint.

However, what these firms are now doing is what we term as edge to core processing. How much of that data can I leave isolated on the device itself without having it transmitted anywhere. If I’m actually taking vibration or temperature readings from a device that hasn’t changed in the last 20 seconds, do I need to take measures every 20 seconds? We have technology as well as our partners. Our competitors have technologies that allow us to process data on the edge on the device itself, and then start to mitigate the movement of that data and therefore, mitigate the cyber security intrusion of that data. That doesn’t eliminate it completely, but what it does do is reduce the amount of data that we’re moving from point A to point B.