SAP with the help of its Leonardo offering is enabling customers to transform their respective business by providing required intelligent systems that would in due course integrate with the core enterprise business systems. These will create endless possibilities for the customers to maximize their business values.
On the IoT front, SAP Leonardo does provide two major components- Leonardo IoT Edge and Leonardo IoT foundation.
Several questions do arise such as:
- What is the need for Business services or IoT Application enablement (AE) in the IoT scenario?
- Where the technical services already offer the device management, connectivity and messaging?
The IoT data has to be sent to the cloud. In this case, the IoT Technical services would enable the hardware device to send some data. In fact, it has all the required technical aspects that do in fact deal with technical services.
There is, in fact, no semantic part to it. On the whole, the business services to provide a business context, semantics and do enrich the details of the piece of hardware which do make sense in a business scenario. In simple terms, this is, in fact, the layer in which a particular device is transformed into a thing.
The device has now been given a proper business context and contains Metadata properties, Time series properties, Reuse the common property sets and so forth.
There is, in fact, a strong synchronization that does establish between the technical services (IoT services) and the business services (IoT AE) that are very much essential to build up an end to end IoT business application.
UI Templates
The Business services do offer UI templates for Web IDE in order to quickly prototype the IoT applications by actually leveraging the strong integration with the underlying things which do make the development faster.
Security and Authorization
The security, as well as authorization concept, is indeed very granular where one can also define the users to have the required access to only to few thing IDs by being able to group them together as a logical group and also assigning scopes, roles, and privileges.
Data Storage and Management
The storage and management of the data (IoT data) are indeed taken care by the business services providing non – aggregated data store, aggregated data store, cold store, etc. The classification of the data is also based upon the retention period that could be well defined as per the requirement.
Thing and Time series APIs
The business services do provide APIs to be able to interact with the THINGS. Few of them are:
- Creating a Thing
- Reading a Thing
- Inserting data into Thing
- Adding time series based values to a Thing
- Querying the required time series data with different filters and options.
Location Service
Location is, no doubt, one of the inseparable components in any IoT scenario.
IoT AE does provide services to be able to define and manage locations such as defining a location.
Business Partner
AE does allow the creation of a business partner, which is also needed in a rather business context. Some of these business partners do include Company, Employee, Supplier, and Customer.
