While some companies are focusing on ways to disrupt framework views of networks, data delivery and cloud integration, the task for other enterprises is finding ways to address the nature of existing infrastructure and deliver helpful tools to the companies that rely on them to do their work.

Nayaki Nayyar, GM and global head of IoT and Innovation Go to Market at SAP SE, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and Brian Gracely (@bgracely), cohosts of theCUBE, from SiliconANGLE Media, at the Red Hat Summit taking place in San Francisco about the challenges facing IoT developers, the need to improve gateways and the tricky task of balancing edge and core services.

Conjunction and cooperation

Nayyar established early in the interview that for SAP, identifying key focus while partnering with the rest of the ecosystem in IoT is a high point of interest right now, though they’re also looking to prioritize the interests of customers by improving infrastructure. “The outcome layer is where customers are really getting value,” she noted, “but you need the connectivity to get that value.”

In examining the frameworks and connections of modern data management, SAP has come to a conclusion: “It’s not an ‘either/or’ [for edge and core with IoT]; it’s an ‘and.’” Nayyar shared the information that for SAP, finding the best way to balance dataloads between these two areas is proving much more effective than setting one as inherently preferable over the other. “It’s all about how you analyze the data, make some decisions and handle the outcomes,” she said.

Nayyar also picked through the idea that with the huge amounts of data being generated these days, the challenge for companies is not just to effectively collect it, but also to decide what to do with it once the data is in their systems.

Data and reusability

While this issue of data utilization will confront practically every company that is actively collecting data from its users and products, each will have their own needs, options and other specifics, making an across-the-board solution impractical at best. Instead, Nayyar said, “Our entire technology staff … what we have done is to make it reusable from implementation to implementation; we have released key IoT services … that customers can deploy at the edge.”

She continued: “There are a lot of out-of-the-box services that come with our platform … that customers can use over and over against across multiple implementations,” she added. As such, by addressing the common issues facing these companies instead of trying to delve into the details, SAP is widening its customer base and improving the utility of its solution sets.

Another issue Nayyar pointed out was the presence of entrenched legacy gateways in data networks, though, as she explained, SAP’s work with Red Hat, Inc. has been alleviating the problems it faces from that situation. “We have all of these Dell gateways, Cisco gateways … that are just moving data around, they don’t have intelligence to filter the noise. So we worked with Red Hat to devise a way to filter the noise out.”

Customers and competitors

Moving on, Nayyar addressed how SAP’s data-management solutions are serving customers. “On the HANA Cloud platform side, we do use data visualization … this implementation is a move so that customers can see what it looks like end-to-end,” she stated. “It’s a good balance between open source and the software providers … to help customers through their innovation cycles.”

Nayyar also shared her thoughts on recent changes in the marketplace: “It is very amazing that the customers and companies that we never thought would be our competitors are being our competitors and partners today. … It’s a great evolution.”

Asked what her advice to customers would be, Nayyar said: “Think big, but start small,” with the suggestion that startups “find a use-case that will give you immediate value” and proceed from there.

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