SAP Labs India, the R&D arm of technology major SAP, is betting big on the Internet of Things (IoT) as it looks to make its in-memory computing technology HANA mainstream.
Talking to BusinessLine , Srikanth Gopalakrishnan, Vice-President, Product Management, and a member of the SAP Labs India Board, said that as everything from home to cars is getting digitised, the company is looking at preparing enterprise customers to make sense of their existing IT systems.
While Gopalakrishnan admits that IoT is at a very nascent stage, he points out that employees within SAP Labs in India, and the company’s customers, need to start thinking of this technology sooner or else be left behind.
“We are sensitising our employees to explore ways in which HANA S4 can be used in a widespread manner,” said Gopalakrishnan.
The company's India R&D operations, the second largest after home market Germany, where SAP is headquartered, have started working on prototypes around IoT, which includes developing sensor technology that analyses driving patterns of a driver, or sensors that can go inside gas pipelines and proactively undertake maintenance.
“The important thing is to explore the unlimited possibilities of IoT, as everybody is in the stage of figuring it out,” said Gopalakrishnan.
Eyeing start-upsMost of the existing ideas in the IoT space have come from within but SAP Labs India officials do not rule out partnerships with start-ups.
This does not change the equation with them in any way and in fact it would help broaden the IoT landscape, pointed out Gopalakrishnan, adding that start-ups will be encouraged to develop applications on HANA S4.
In line with this, SAP has opened its Application Programming Interfaces and partnered with open-source technologies such as Hadoop and CloudFoundry to drive IoT adoption.