SAP SE has acquired the Internet of Things (IoT) platform vendor PLAT.ONE for an undisclosed sum. The news comes as SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) announced investment plans of €2 billion over the next five years.
As Jeremy Cowan reports, the investment plan is designed to help business and government entities benefit from the proliferation of sensors, smart devices and Big Data that is transforming business with the IoT.
PLAT.ONE’s IoT platform reportedly enables the rapid development and scalable management of enterprise IoT environments, including connected products, smart cities, connected transport and smart manufacturing.
Dr. John Bates, CEO of PLAT.ONE said, “It is a great testimony to the PLAT.ONE team and technology that SAP selected PLAT.ONE to become a key part of its IoT offering. We believe this acquisition further strengthens and solidifies SAP’s position as the global leader in the connected business space and we’re excited to be part of that opportunity.”
SAP’s IoT approach enables IoT development and runtime services through the Hana Cloud Platform (HCP) – to make it easy for enterprises and system integrators to build IoT-enabled applications. SAP utilises HCP to build its own IoT solutions to accelerate deployment of particular IoT use cases for customers. HCP also empowers SAP’s partner ecosystem, enabling partners to populate the SAP Hana Application Center marketplace with IoT-enabled solutions.
Bjoern Goerke, executive vice president of Product and Innovation Technology at SAP said, “We conducted a review of IoT platforms in the market and found PLAT.ONE to be a strong leader, particularly in device interoperability, edge processing capabilities, and development capabilities. It is great to add these leading capabilities to SAP HCP.”
Filippo Murroni, founder and CTO of PLAT.ONE, added, “We are delighted to be part of SAP. We’ve done amazing things as a start-up and now we look forward to contributing strategically to a much larger business.” PLAT.ONE is the leading enterprise-grade IoT solutions platform. By simplifying the process of creating, deploying and managing complex IoT solutions, PLAT.ONE radically shortens time-to-value for IoT applications and significantly reduces the cost of their management. Specifically, PLAT.ONE
PLAT.ONE is an enterprise-grade IoT solutions platform. By simplifying the process of creating, deploying and managing complex IoT solutions, PLAT.ONE aims to radically shorten time-to-value for IoT applications and significantly reduce the cost of their management. Specifically, PLAT.ONE is said to enable complex device connectivity and management across a wide number of industry standard machine and messaging protocols.
It reportedly offers a micro services-based adaptive architecture that can adapt to run logic on the device, at the edge or in the cloud, depending on the solution requirements. A semantic data model future-proofs applications by abstracting sets of underlying sensors and devices as IoT business objects, such as trucks or street lamps. Finally, the company offers pre-built solution accelerators for a number of different IoT use cases, including smart cities, connected products and smart transportation.
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MachNation, US-based specialists in IoT middleware, tell IoT Now that they believe this is important for several reasons. First, the IoT application enablement space — of which PLAT.ONE is a part — is red hot. According to MachNation detailed forecasts, worldwide IoT application enablement revenue will be US$1.1 billion in 2016 growing to US$83.4 billion by 2025 at a 62% compound annual growth rate. 73% of total IoT application enablement revenues comes from countries in the developed world.
PLAT.ONE is an IoT Platform-Enabled Solution (PES) that MachNation profiled in its 2016 IoT PES ScoreCard. Aimed primarily at industrial sector customers, PLAT.ONE will provide SAP with a set of IoT dashboards, visualization tools and applications to SAP HANA customers.
The PLAT.ONE solution does not offer a true multi-tenant cloud solution, but that will not be a problem for SAP HANA customers that generally prefer dedicated cloud instances.
Finally, according to MachNation’s 2016 IoT Platform-Enabled Solutions (PES) ScoreCard, PLAT.ONE’s in-house services team and partnership program were not large enough to sustain the type of growth seen in the IoT PES industry. This stymied the growth of PLAT.ONE. The SAP acquisition will certainly resolve these tactical deficiencies at PLAT.ONE.
says Steve Hilton, analyst at MachNation.
