SAP and VMWare announce they will work together on a “pre-integrated, pre-tested solution” for fast IoT deployments.
VMware and SAP have unveiled a new partnership that they claim will result in an “enterprise IoT-ready architecture” for customers.
This term, according to the companies, refers to an offering that comprises both an infrastructure plane and an application plane. “The infrastructure layer refers to the IoT infrastructure itself, along with the capabilities to manage and secure it, whereas the application plane analyzes insight-rich data from connected things to drive business decisions and processes,” they said in a public statement.
In other words, it’s safe to assume that they’ll be combining SAP’s analytics cloud, which enables companies to explore business transactions and device data for new insights, with VMware’s systems for infrastructure management.
According to the companies, the agreement will enable the “fast deployment, scalability and on-schedule execution of IoT projects.”
Read more: SAP shifts gears of IoT into business ERP
Time to value
While details are sketchy, both companies say they are working together to develop a pre-integrated, pre-tested solution for fast IoT deployments, while providing the necessary security and management capabilities for IoT architecture across gateways, data centers and the cloud, in order to “drastically help speed up time to value”.
Through collaboration and testing, VMware and SAP plan to offer mutual customers real-time visibility by converging time-series device data with business transactional data via SAP, while VMware will enable IT to have visibility and control of the IoT use case from the infrastructure operations point of view.
Read more: VMware launches Pulse IoT Center
Working together
The premise here appears to be that IoT is not taking off as quickly as it should be and that, where it is happening, many projects prove to be more complicated, and less scalable, than initially anticipated.
“VMware and SAP have a long and rich history of working together to empower our mutual customers to transform their businesses with solutions that help to innovate, simplify and move toward a software-defined enterprise architecture,” said Mimi Spier, vice president of IoT at VMware.
“Companies win when they can make intelligent real-time decisions at the edge; SAP Leonardo supports that bold innovation,” said Nils Herzberg, senior vice president and global head of IoT go-to-market and strategic partnerships for SAP.
“As customers start to implement, one obstacle to realizing that vision is tackling infrastructure lifecycle and management outside of the traditional data centre,” he added.
Both companies have been working on IoT for some time, independently of each other. In May, VMware announced Pulse IoT Center, hailed by the company as a “secure, enterprise-grade IoT infrastructure management solution.” In the same month, SAP used its Sapphire 2017 conference to showcase a new iteration of its Leonardo digital innovation system.