SAP SE might be struggling to get its cloud business up and running, but that hasn’t deterred it from pushing onwards and upwards. And so what’s next? The Internet of Things (IoT).

The company unveiled its HANA Cloud Platform (HCP) for the IoT at Sapphire Now 2015 yesterday, before saying it plans to deepen its partnerships with chipmaker Intel Corp. and German corporation Siemens AG to expand its IoT portfolio.

The HANA Cloud Platform was introduced by Bernd Leukert of SAP’s executive board, who said the platform could be used to power apps in everything from smart cars and vending machines to cities and logistics.

“We get the possibilities of taking the data streams from these products and store them, process them in real time, adding the richness of the HANA Cloud Platform itself with the predictive [analytics] capabilities,” he said.

“It comes with a direct connection into your existing business, which is key to success; you need to close the loop from inside millions of sensors into your operational business up to the boardroom.”

The HANA Cloud Platform is built on SAP’s existing predictive analytics, telematics and geolocation technologies, and allows companies to connect to devices right across their business. The platform can be deployed on company’s private clouds, or it can be used by organizations to operate a device cloud for their own customers.

As for the partnerships with Intel and Siemens, these can be seen as the second part of SAP’s IoT play. Intel has committed itself to providing a blueprint for SAP to craft interoperable IoT tools compatible with HANA that will accelerate and simplify IoT deployments. For the first step, the two companies will develop a joint proof of concept to integrate the SAP cloud with Intel’s IoT gateway.

Meanwhile Siemens is intent on building a private cloud specific to its industry, and intends on using the Hana Cloud Platform to do just that. The idea is that by combining SAP’s and its own clouds, the company’s industrial partners will be able to analyze extremely large datasets and derive insights from devices and sensors that make up the Industrial Internet. Siemens also hopes to encourage developers and manufacturers to join the party too, by leaving the new Hana Cloud Platform ecosystem open.

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