How are business strategies shifting to incorporate edge devices and the valuable data they provide? Here to answer that question is Nayaki Nayyar, GM and global head of IoT and Innovation Go-To-Market at SAP SE. As the featured guest for our Women in Tech segment this week, Nayyar joined theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at the Red Hat Summit in San Francisco.

Nayyar offered insight into how companies are strategizing and changing their business models based on edge devices and the valuable information they provide. She spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely), cohosts of theCUBE, During Red Hat Summit 2016.

Narrowing the playing field of IoT

To start off the interview, Miniman asked Nayyar about SAP’s journey into the Internet of Things (IoT), and what major differentiators the company has that makes it stand out. She pointed out that narrowing a wide playing field is the key.

“Part of the whole IoT strategy, we have defined ‘things to outcome’ as a framework because it’s such a big, wide topic. We have very clearly come out and identified what is the key focus for SAP while we partner with the rest of the ecosystem to give us a connectivity layer across four different industry clusters. We are razor-focused on manufacturing, high-tech, professional services and various other industries, for which we are building solutions for each of [these] right now.”

Edge vs. core

Gracely brought up whether IoT is going to be an edge technology or a core technology, and Nayyar explained that it is not one or the other.

“Whenever I visit a customer they say, ‘Where is money in IoT? Is it really the connectivity layer, or is the value and outcomes it generates?’ And what we believe, is the outcome layer is where customers are really getting value, but you need the connectivity to get to those outcomes. You need the edge computing; you need to make that intelligent. And as we bring the data in, the value is derived from the data. That is what the customers are looking for. So it is not an either/or, it is an and – edge plus the application that generate outcomes out of it.”

Following up, Miniman wanted to know how advanced we are when it comes to IoT, and Nayyar provided some perspective through use cases.

“I would say that we are in the very early stages, but let me give you some examples of customers. … If you look at Under Armour, as a brand it was barely known 10 to 15 years back. Today they are not only competing with all the majors, the Nikes and Reeboks of the world, but they have transitioned their business model of not just selling fitness products, but selling fitness as a service, which means they have to be monitoring the fitness levels of all their billions and billions of consumers around the world and prompt and nudge them to exercise more so they can stay fit.

“So here is a great story, a company that was just selling fitness products because of IoT, now they can get connected with their consumers and the health of those consumers and provide that service to them. This evolution of business models for large manufacturers is same thing. The GEs [General Electrics] of the world, Siemens, all of them are going through a big transformation of not just selling equipment, but selling it as a service, the outcome that the customer is looking for. And this is where I see a big transformation going on.”

The value of IoT

How does SAP help to identify the use case? Nayyar explained that it lies within the value proposition.

 “We have what we call ‘Design Thinking’ workshops where we [work] with the customers to identify what are the key scenarios [where] the customers can get value. For example, Trenitalia, one of the largest operators of trains in Italy. We do a full workshop upfront to identify what is the right use case for them to get value, and then we start implementing the solution.

“In Trenitalia’s case, they actually collect 700 terabytes of data coming from one their trains, and that data gets collected from all of their trains. So what do you do with all that data? It’s all about how you analyze the data, and they’ll make some decisions and get some outcomes. … We have to start by identifying what the right use case is and we go about implementing it for the customer.”

Reusing business processes for IoT

Gracely mentioned that SAP is well known for its technology around supply chains and business process. He asked if there are business processes that are reusable for IoT? According to Nayyar, there are out-of-the-box solutions.

“Our entire technology stack, the core of it is SAP HANA, which is our platform. And what we have done is to make it reusable from implementation to implementation. We have released key IoT services that customers can get started [with]. These are not specific to any one scenario, but they are generic enough, what we call the intelligent edge, where customers can deploy at the edge and it filters the noise out, and as [the data] comes into our core platform, our HANA platform, we have various services, like remote data syncing, we have dynamic tiering, so customers can use other data lakes for warm and cold storage and end-to-end management.

“So there are a lot of out-of-the-box services that come with our platform, which are not customer specific or implementation specific, so the customers can reuse over and over again across multiple implementations.”

Red Hat and open-source innovation engines around IoT

SAP is working with Red Hat on several different projects. Nayyar talked about what her team is doing and SAP’s relationship with the open-source community.

“We are working with Red Hat, especially at that intelligent edge. … We have our software called [SAP] SQL Anywhere; we merge it with MQ [Red Hat JBoss A-MQ] as a message broker between the devices. We also leveraged the BRMS tool [Red Hat JBoss BRMS] to filter the noise out. On the HANA Cloud Platform side, we do use Red Hat JBoss for data virtualization to federate the data and have some cool mobile apps.

“At SAP we are totally committed [to open source]. We believe that open source is adding a lot of value and innovation to the entire IoT journey and all the new technologies that are coming out. So it is a good balance between open source and also the software providers and how we bring the data together and really help customers through their innovation cycles.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Red Hat Summit.

Photo by SiliconANGLE