Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: David Parker, Global Vice President, SAP (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Only if you can ensure that it is a secure process. Because if you look at all the breaches that we’ve seen like the Target breach, it’s opening up huge question marks on whether it’s a good idea to expose that much of surface area to security threats.

David Parker: That’s one side of it. That’s if you engage with the end consumers. In the case of IoT for the retailer, obviously a lot of them have inventory management. They still have transportation logistics. They’re more focused on how to optimize that and how they actually have goods just in time as opposed to a stockpile of goods that aren’t easily replenished by sales.

Sramana Mitra: To the extent that the use cases are logistics use cases and IoT is used at the container level, I would say those are probably more penetrated. When it comes to actually turning every single item into a sensor item, I think that adoption is far away.

David Parker: Absolutely. There’s not any signs of that abating anytime soon. There’s a difference between that depending upon what region you go to. Obviously, APJ has very tight controls on data movement as does Europe. You bring the US into the equation if you’re a global enterprise company, you can’t even share information that you have in the US with data that you’re collecting over at APJ. This is where a lot of our customers are asking SAP to help. We’re seeing a lot of requests to have things like Data-as-a-Service. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Nielsen Media companies that provide Point of Sale data and aggregate that to provide some insight. Then, they resell that out to individual CPG and retail companies.

Sramana Mitra: Those are data applications. They’re not Internet of Things applications.

David Parker: This is the thing. If you’re getting data from the thing itself.

Sramana Mitra: You’re not getting data from the thing itself, right? To get data from the thing itself, you need sensors on the thing. The retail vertical is not adopting that yet.

David Parker: I get that. What I’m referring to here is in order to get the concern around data privacy and data security, SAP and other vendors have been approached to say, “Can you be the custodian of these data and sign up for the ownership of the data?” This clearly has huge ramifications on the legal side for SAP or any other vendor in that space.

Sramana Mitra: What data are you talking about?

David Parker: This is consumer data and augmenting that consumer data with sensor data or whatever business data. The very same thing we’re talking about, the retail business is very concerned about doing because of data breach and data security issues. What those companies are doing is approaching vendors like ourselves to say, “Would you take ownership of that data and safeguard that data?”

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: David Parker, Global Vice President, SAP
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